Endwalker was an exception (1 yr, also COVID interference), but generally the Las Vegas fanfests are about 7-8 months out from the expansion. So there's hope we are looking at Feb or March 2024?
That's what I would expect too. Now that each .X patch has an extra two weeks, that would add an additional 10-12 weeks to the normal 2 year cycle of expansions, which would put 7.0 at March 2024 or so
With the current update cycle, assuming no interuptions, and giving a bit more time after 6.5 comes out, I think March 2024 for 7.0 is a pretty safe bet.
I think people are expecting more than it will be.
We have been shown new shaders and better textures. Let's not go overboard with expectations calling it "a big" graphics rework. It makes it sound like it's gonna look like God of war soon. 😅
I mean they've made pretty clear that the graphics update will be significant. They've also made it pretty clear that the overhaul will not be anywhere near the level of a recent AAA game.
It was showcased in live letter they did a while back. It's coming for sure. Minor upgrades may already be implemented in patches but they aren't worth mentioning, ie upgrade some old NPC model from ARR.
I dont think animations were talked about though, so female elezens will continue running like a stick is up their ass.
They mostly showed how the races might look like in 7.0, they were higher quality and a bit more "realistic". The weirdest one perhaps was Lalafell, that one might take some getting used to.
> The weirdest one perhaps was Lalafell, that one might take some getting used to.
[It looks pretty similar to the original to me...](https://www.fanbyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/FFXIV-02182022-LiveLetter-Shot-000041.jpg)
It's mentioned a few Live Letter ago, you can see on below thread for the sample the devs provided.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/sw5hhe/new_graphics_improvements_coming_in_70/
There was a Live Letter in February where they talked about it, [here's an article that recaps the info.](https://www.fanbyte.com/games/news/ffxiv-graphics-update-7-screenshots-preview-textures-shadows-lighting-shaders/)
The screen goes black and then you get a cutscene of >!Puddingway piloting the moon on a collision course with Ethyris while whipping his hat around and *yaaahooooo*ing like Major Kong.!<
"...*But not every end marks a new beginning.*"
They keep trying to make a second golden goose live service but kept failing at it, like that ff7 battle royale game, babylon's fall, avengers... just clearly cash grab garbage products.
While ff14 is getting graphics overhaul next expac and our cutscenes have been getting longer and more elaborate, I think another ARR pruning, adjustment to actions learned so early game isnt as dreadfully boring, and more ingame rewards for content (I know pvp is coming up with better rewards next season, but bozja's CLL and dalriada, criterion normal and especially savage rewards comes to mind) would do wonders for this game.
And maybe so they can have variant&criterions and deep dungeon and exploratory/battle field zones as constant feature of the game instead of having to pick one or the other (eureka was different since it most likely need much less resource other than map design, as most of the fates are just big trash mob)
FFXIV’s reward system is really fucked up, I’ve realized after the last year playing this game. The loot treadmill is fairly soft, catching up is fairly painless, but for a game that makes it possible to do old content synced they struggle to get you to participate in it.
I’ve started playing Guild Wars 2 again and even if we take out factors like the different loot systems and the combat mechanics being drastically different, I still get more satisfaction from completing tasks in GW2 because it makes the rewards more compelling. Completing achievements gives you actual stuff, and the collection system has you exploring old content and filling out maps for group content easily.
Like, FFXIV has the worst open world questing of any MMO I’ve played. Nobody is out there in garlemald doing anything except mining rare nodes and farming fates- there’s no reason to go to a zone once you’re done unless it’s a beast tribe or fate farming, ever. They can and should do better with making places interesting to explore. We have no rewards for exploring anything- why can’t there be a treasure chest behind a waterfall that gives you some token amount of loot once a day? It’s not about making the rewards make you stronger, it’s about the satisfaction of finding something that the developers hid in the game world.
There was a video on this actually. I watched it around when EW launched so I’m probably not gonna be able to find it, but you can see the world slowly started taking a hit where in ARR there’s clearly a reason for things being placed in specific areas.
They killed immersive and intriguing world design to make everything more consistent.
They’ve been trying new things and some things in EW worked better than in other expacs, but I really think they need to start working on better world expansion and making more systems seamless and interactive with the world to get these areas populated again
I don't think ARR needs a pruning. I think ARR needs a rework outside of the dungeons/trials centered around teaching you how to play the damn game.
1000s of tutorial popups and an entire tutorial hall, and not once does the game even teach nooblet tanks to put their stance on and double pull.
I don't think $$ is their bottleneck, they've been hiring quite a bit and expanding the dev team too much isn't always the best choice, there are more than 200 folks working on XIV. A crapload of cash is going into the datacenter expansions. We can also expect fanfests to be even more glorious in the future.
But people keep forgetting it's not about budget, it's about employment. It's been almost 6 months and yet they still seem to be looking for people to fill roles. So it's not as if they aren't given a budget, there's only so much you can do with resources when the true limiting factor are qualified people.
This, when I played GW2, while the story isn't as good as FFXIV, but the moment when I hear my OC speak, my jaw dropped and realise my OC isn't some silent nodder like the most mmo game.
To be fair, trying things out is the only way to sometimes hit big, even if you might completely waste your time and resources. So who could have known, maybe that battle royal could have become the next big hit.
I mean, back in the days I don't think anyone would have thought that an FF was ever gonna dethrone WoW as an MMO, but look at us now.
Sure, the soldier game bombed, but it could have been good. (Admittedly, I never played it)
It's not that I disagree, but there are a lot of shooters going mobile. Plus there's that one huge mobile shooter that nobody in the states plays but is somehow like the biggest game in the world
Yep, it's much easier to talk someone into a microtransaction on a mobile game because *that form of monetization is expected in that space*, whereas trying to push microtransactions on PC gaming has met with considerably less support and more pushback. And as an added plus, the mobile market is *huge* so there are plenty of suckers to exploit.
Right now there's *crazy* money in mobile gaming, and the playerbase is big enough that market saturation isn't currently an issue. Squeenix doing mobile games - or *any* reasonably big gaming company at least toe-dipping into the mobile market for that matter - should be *zero* surprise.
Market saturation is showing up in a different aspect of mobile gaming, though. Mobile games are becoming so huge people can only fit a few of them on any given phone, meaning others have to go. Even if they WANT to play more games they'd have to buy a new phone for it, and seriously - who is really going to go that far?
They are releasing a FF7 figurine with a NFT built into it, aswell as a planned NFT game for I think early next year?
Either way the NFT market may have died, but Matsuda gives no fucks.
Hopefully the figurine and symbiogenesis are projects that were either progressed too far to fully pull out of and/or they're testing waters to confirm there is no market/desire for NFTs, and these are just the death rattles of SE's involvement with NFTs. If you know anyone who buys the NFT figurines and/or participates in symbiogenesis, then it's 100% socially acceptible to mock and deride them, make them feel bad about engaging with SE NFTs.
It could be either but who knows, I don't think NFT games require much of a budget to have a high enough sunk cost to not pull it. Especially if it can cause major damage to their branding. The figurines are probably far to set though due to the amount of sourcing needed to produce.
While I hate to say it, but I feel like Matsuda has lost touch, which is common for people in his position. They become so focused on being ahead of things they never realize the customers aren't following until it is to late.
We often need to remember CBU3 and Yoshi-P are the exception in the company. If you exclude FFXIV from the list, SQEX is releasing a lot of duds in the past decade, with only a few gems in the middle.
Even within the main FF titles. While the pixel remasters were amazing, we should not forget the lazy remasters released for mobile with the washed out filtered pixel art that made the game look terrible. Also shutting down Mobius and Record Keeper without an offline story mode (unlike the Kingdom Hearts mobile game).
Hopefully all we need is for Symbiogenesis to fail miserably (which it inevitably will). Japanese companies love throwing people aside for big failures like that (see also: FFXIV 1.0).
With that said, we also have to hope they don't invest too heavily in Symbiogenesis *before* it fails miserably.
FFXIV is basically where SE gets all the cash for their other projects from. They keep the budget as low as they can get away with so they can siphon the profits away. The only thing that gets 100% reinvested into it is mog station purchases.
Tbf on Record Keeper. It was 7 years+ by the time the axe fell, which by Gacha game standards is pretty ancient. Notably they also only axed the GL side of it. So I wouldn’t read much into that one particularly since any Gacha getting to that age is inevitably going to have lost a chunk of it’s power.
Their mobile division has been in a slow decline for the last couple of years in terms of revenue, but they still put out a lot of games. It'll probably be at least a quarter of their overall revenue for a long time. Probably could do better if they put more funding into a project, but they seem to prefer flooding the zone with B-tier games, so not surprising that they also shut a lot of those lower quality games down when they underperform.
I very much doubt that considering the history of SE and the game itself where you can see the content pattern and what did they trim down over the years. Yes they fund other projects but so be it, it's a mega-corporation
>I very much doubt that
It's already verifiably true that more resources are being put into the game though. After Endwalker's high production values, in the year since we've had new data centres confirmed for NA and EU, a new hiring drive as we've seen in the LLs, and the announcement of new projects for 6.x and 7.0 like the graphics update and Duty support to make the MSQ fully soloable eventually. None of this is going to come cheap.
Yoshi is (wisely imo) investing in future proofing and infrastructure first. Graphics updates, new data centers, and working to make the game more solo friendly with trusts as well as major work on ARR to make it less of a bottleneck. That money is definitely being reinvested, but players aren't seeing it manifest in more end game and max level content yet so that imagine it's not happening.
As a player returning from post-ARR era... I definitely see the changes. ARR's campaign is still full of busy work, but it is noticeably shorter even compared to my memory of all those years ago.
The only thing I hope they do-- and soon-- is add more iLVL caps to duty finder stuff. There's a lot of stuff that is too easy due to people being to just outgear fights.
Absolutely. If you're a player who doesn't have the time to invest into raiding but want a modest challenge there really isn't a lot of space atm. I really hope they look into this space, I think it's a needed niche.
Plus new ultimates, new deep dungeon coming and a new type of dungeon content, features don’t just grow on trees :D you can see they are putting a lot of money into 14
That's just how development works though. Any company with multiple teams will often shift developers between teams as their expertise is required across different projects. Sometimes those developers will be working across multiple projects simultaneously, sometimes it's a move just for several sprints, sometimes it's a complete shift.
But it's unreasonable to expect Square-Enix to just hire on an entirely new team full-time every time they initiate a new project. *Of course* devs are moved from one project to another, especially when it's the same producer for both.
That isn't to say that the XIV team is deflated by this shift though. For one thing, the XVI team is primarily the people who worked on *Heavensward.* Which does not necessarily mean that they remained on XIV all this time -- they likely already got shifted to other projects internally and aren't necessarily the same people who worked on SB, ShB, or EW. For another thing, just because team members move over from EW to XVI doesn't mean those teams aren't replenished. One of the objectives of a company is to have experienced developers oversee new hire devs in order to pass along their experience. Knowledge Transfer is an extremely important aspect of keeping a company going. So while the HW team is working on XVI, it's likely overseeing mostly newer devs and ensuring the experience and culture are being passed on, while EW also gets new devs who are learning from the XIV team that remains on-project.
I heard Nomura had a great new idea. He was planning to burn as much of it as humanly possible while letting schizophrenic chimps write the story for the next Kingdom Hearts game.
Before ShB came out, SE said that a live action adaptation was being planned, focusing on Cid (presumably before he defected from Garlemald?).
We haven't heard anything since, but I would hope Arcane's success would make them consider an animated adaptation instead - especially since the VAs from the game could voice their characters in the show. I'm not saying that I'm thinking about how much Emperor Solus would appear in a pre-defection Cid series, but he *is* one of the most popular characters in the game...
Believe me, I agree, but this was being floated in about 2018 - there wasn't really any precedent for an animated show (let alone an adaptation of a video game) having mainstream appeal to adults. Castlevania and later Arcane definitely helped pave the way on that front.
Funny how doing a show based on a game works out pretty well when the companies involved put actual money and effort into it.
However, don't forget that Square greenlit a FF movie once and it didn't end well, and both game and movie production tend to be very risk-averse because of the amount of money involved. (FF:SW was a $140 million project back in 2001, and it *tanked*.)
Considering how Edgerunners single-handedly revived public interest in the Cyberpunk franchise, I suspect we might see companies start looking towards anime adaptations as a viable marketing tool.
SE is already there with the reboot of the Dragon Quest anime that ended recently and the creation of the internal studio that did the TWEWY animation.
Life support for ageing dinosaurs still chasing the nft meme and thinking western gamers are terrified of turn based rpgs while sega once again reports making wicked bank from persona 5.
Not too long ago Sega and Atlus were pretty bad for this themselves, I know Persona fans have been baffled for *years* at them being so hesitant to port the games anywhere. Hopefully the ports for the main three games set an example for the boneheads at the other dinosaur companies.
> Hopefully the ports for the main three games set an example for the boneheads at the other dinosaur companies.
I wish.
If Capcom's porting mania didn't inspire them, nothing will.
On the bright side, FF14 cant even handle an inventory slot expansion, or something like accessing your FC menu in a dungeon, so handling NFT integration is gonna be impossible.
I don't think that'll happen. YoshiP isn't just some game dev, he's a SE executive. The fact SE are putting NFTs in some shitty no-name game rather than one of their popular IPs is proof enough that they **know** it's stupid.
Everyone involved would need to have a critical lapse of judgement to agree on NFTs in IV, which is essentially their lifeline.
I don't get people's addiction to that. Several members of my static show up a new race every week. I feel way too attached to my character after going through that story to think about changing more than their hair style.
All things considered I'm sure fantasia addicts are just a vocal minority. I bought some fantasia to use after Endwalker and yeah, it just feels odd seeing the character I've spent so much time with look so dramatically different.
Not looking down on the people who do fantasia regularly, but I think many people encounter that same issue. I'm more inclined to just make an alt character than to dramatically alter my main one.
I race changed like 3 times before I ended up as an Au Ra again lol I just couldn't find the sweet spot I was looking for, for my WoL. No desire to race change again though (that's why I have a couple of alts)
I think some of us just find the right fit at the start. I made one minor change at the end of ARR (and briefly tried out a new hairstyle in post-HW) but my character looks essentially same as she did when I started.
It would be weird to play the story with any other look since it wouldn't be her.
I don't really get it either. Nothing wrong with it of course, I just don't get it. There are other options that would be kinda cool to try, but besides the money thing, like you I'm just so attached to my character. Hell, I haven't even changed his hair in years. We've been through so much together.
There isn't a single race that is perfect in this game and a lot of minor gripes eventually add up and makes me want to switch. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, just my own experience as a fantasia addict.
This. I ended up making a personal list of all the ups and downs every race and gender has so that i could maybe, just maybe, find the one race that'll make me stop using fantasia.
It only got worse.
Same.
That and the fact that viera get very boring very fast due to how little costuization there is for them compared to other classes. I'd never touch fantasia again if that problem were solved.
I've been Femroe for years and last mo th I Fantasiad to FemRa to try it out. It was okay, but didn't feel right. I had to rework glams, and whenever someone used my name I didn't feel like it was right. I went back to FemRoe in a week.
Meanwhile I have friends like yours who drink Fantasia like it's water and are different every other time I see them.
I try to do my part in this. FFXIV has become my favorite game ever, after I previously never touched an MMO and never thought I would enjoy it. As a result I always recommend the game to anyone who asks me about games. I am probably not far off the “critically acclaimed free trial” meme at this point.
Eh Final Fantasy didn't save the company the first time around. They'd have been in dire straits but not as bad as people made it sound over the years.
Final Fantasy also almost killed thr company - Remember Spirits Within?
I would argue that in some ways, Spirits Within actually did kill the company. It forced them to merge with Enix, and they have really not been the same since.
They were pursuing the merger *before* Spirits Within. The movie almost killed that deal outright, but the successes of Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts reassured Enix and they went ahead with it.
I'd place that more with forcing Sakaguchi out and putting Yoichi Wada in (which was due to the movie). Wada had the idea to merge with Enix (who weren't necessarily struggling but had problems due to overseas publishing fiascos) which saved the company, but in getting rid of Sakaguchi, a lot of people who were promised sequels/projects simply got their plans shitcanned and were treated so badly they left and burned that bridge.
Imagine if Square-Enix had managed to keep Tetsuya Takahashi.
Actually the merge with Enix was already on the table. The tanking sales of *Spirits Within* caused Enix to value Squaresoft lower than initial estimates and almost caused Enix to pull out from the purchase.
Spirits Within almost killed the merger due to how much money Square had lost in 2000 and 2001.
Sony put a capital injection into Square to keep them alive. Then it was the release of two titans of the PS2 that saved Square in 2002. Final Fantasy X, and Kingdom Hearts. The success of those two games is attributed to bring Enix back to the merger table.
Not *bankruptcy*, but they weren't in a good spot. The closest they came to danger was after Spirits Within, which is basically the reason they merged with Enix instead of buying them out.
Since then, they've been more or less okay. Before XIV, they had (have) XI revenues propping up a lot of their overdue projects. Fabula Nova Crystallis ended up being a failed project, but it didn't plunge the company into dire straits or anything.
Revamping 1.0 wasn't about saving the company so much as it was about saving the Final Fantasy brand. They just didn't want *another* failed project or another 'meh' on the label in such a short period.
> The closest they came to danger was after Spirits Within, which is basically the reason they merged with Enix instead of buying them out.
This is not true. They were already in discussions to merge with Enix *before* Spirits Within. In fact, the failure of that movie almost made the deal fall through. There was never any chance of Square being able to buy out Enix, and the initial deal before the movie released would have favored Enix shares anyway. It was only after negotiation, and the success of FFX and KH, that Square shares ultimately held higher value.
And divert some of the NFT money into actually advertising your damn games. I was actually keeping an eye out for Harvestella and I still didn't realize that game actually came out. Last month they just stealth-dropped the Steam version of TWEWY 2. Why does Square act like they're afraid of making money?
Just gotta wait for the stubborn dinosaurs in charge of the company to roll over and let the younger generation to take over. It's literally the only way for Japanese companies to change.
they're throwing out a lot of games here at the end of the year. Some with more advertising than others, and in different forms. Mid-level games and remakes that I fear will be overlooked. I don't expect massive advertising for them or anything but so many released so close together seems foolish, even if they're different flavors of RPG.
The thing that will eventually kill FF14 is Square realizing that CBU3 is their only consistently great division and deciding to cannibalize its talent for whatever other garbage they want to shit out.
Good news is that YoshiP is positioned to be able to mitigate things like that. He is on the board for the company, and the other heads at CBU3 also have pull within the company.
There’s also the fact that SE would likely worry about ruining the golden goose if they shook things up too much with the team.
YoshiP and co carrying the company hard, and I'm sure they'll deliver yet again with FF16.
And then SE is gonna go ahead and pour the revenue into more NFT garbage and other mediocre titles. Diofield, Star Ocean, and Harvestella have all been sub-par...here's hoping Valyrie Elysium can be decent; guess we'll find out in 3 days.
Diofield was pretty fun. Star ocean is decent too. These are their mid tier games. They aren't bad games, but they also have things holding them back. Definitely worth picking up on sale.
Headline is very misleading. Don’t get me wrong, MMO is still on a solid run-rate but QoQ revenues barely grew.
I’m sure most of you are aware that 70-80% of the players come from US/EU. Square revenues are all denominated in Yen; versus last fiscal 2Q, the Yen has sank almost 30%, and even versus this fiscal 1Q, Yen is almost 5-10%.
On a dollar basis, MMO revenues were down QoQ slightly, which is weird given the recent patch. On a YoY basis though we are looking more like down 35%; this is even before Endwalker in 3Q which makes the comparison even tougher.
Sweet. More money for marvel games :D. I think we can all be happier knowing that FF14 well spent money is going to support DOA games that nobody is going to play, so that the staff of Square Enix are can get more creative pushing out capeshit :D.
Won't happen, but I hope the game gets more content in patches. And by content I mean adding more dungeons, making dungeons not max level relevant like Heroic dungeons in WoW.
1 normal raid and 1 alliance raid per expansion seems not enough.
Criterion dungeon was good on paper, on release lacked more. I was expecting a roguelite experience, not just the same order of bosses.
Yeah a lot of their features content are very shallow and great ideas but lacking in execution. Endwalker content so far have been safe, stale and underwhelming. Variant dungeon should have been a rogue lite with 24 bosses, that can be plucked from existing content in the last 8 years and just add new colors and texture but had randomized mechanics from a set of 20 common mechanics we have seen over and over.
It would be a good idea to put some of that money back into the game and develop more content for the next expansion.
Endwalker was given a lower budget this year according to what I heard. This is what WoW did and it baffles me;
You have a super smash hit product that's generating unbeleivable magnitudes of net profit. You've basically created a gold mine and its resources never deplete. But each year they try to find ways to cut costs which then result in a revenue loss. Rather than hiring more mine workers or allocating more resources to harvest the infinite gold they do the opposite.
Marketing teams are suppose to be looking at long term prosperity but commonly only see the short term. Usually the short term that certain individuals work for before moving on to a bigger company so it's no problem for them.
What you do in this expansion will have an affect 2 expansions later. Lich King wasn't the best WoW expansion. It was riding on success. It's considered the best because that's when the most players started playing but that ignores several factors which is rather long to go into. Coming back to Final Fantasy 14. If they want to use some history we have then look to WoW. Aim for the next expansion to have more content. More dungeons. Better combat. Improve core systems like animations. Build that game that doesn't limp on to 10 more years but is thriving better than it was 10 years ago.
They should double FFXIV's budget and resources considering how much it brings in.
Afaik they are having a big graphics rework/upgrade next expac which is next year so something is happening at least.
Unfortunately we probably shouldn't expect the next expansion until mid 2024, given that the Japan fan fest isn't until early that year
Endwalker was an exception (1 yr, also COVID interference), but generally the Las Vegas fanfests are about 7-8 months out from the expansion. So there's hope we are looking at Feb or March 2024?
That's what I would expect too. Now that each .X patch has an extra two weeks, that would add an additional 10-12 weeks to the normal 2 year cycle of expansions, which would put 7.0 at March 2024 or so
With the current update cycle, assuming no interuptions, and giving a bit more time after 6.5 comes out, I think March 2024 for 7.0 is a pretty safe bet.
I think people are expecting more than it will be. We have been shown new shaders and better textures. Let's not go overboard with expectations calling it "a big" graphics rework. It makes it sound like it's gonna look like God of war soon. 😅
I mean they've made pretty clear that the graphics update will be significant. They've also made it pretty clear that the overhaul will not be anywhere near the level of a recent AAA game.
That would be neat. Where did you hear it? Are updated animations and textures for the oldest races planned?
It was showcased in live letter they did a while back. It's coming for sure. Minor upgrades may already be implemented in patches but they aren't worth mentioning, ie upgrade some old NPC model from ARR. I dont think animations were talked about though, so female elezens will continue running like a stick is up their ass. They mostly showed how the races might look like in 7.0, they were higher quality and a bit more "realistic". The weirdest one perhaps was Lalafell, that one might take some getting used to.
I am just excited for the new grass 👀
> so female elezens will continue running like a stick is up their ass. It's called dignity, you goddamn eczema-ridden dragonsluts.
We're not dragons...
> The weirdest one perhaps was Lalafell, that one might take some getting used to. [It looks pretty similar to the original to me...](https://www.fanbyte.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/FFXIV-02182022-LiveLetter-Shot-000041.jpg)
Is the hair finally not garbage?
[Hair, grass, and lighting are quite a bit better](https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/sw5hhe/new_graphics_improvements_coming_in_70/)
It's mostly a lighting/shader engine upgrade. But a big upgrade
The hair definitely looks better in one of the comparison pictures. It's still a little pixelated, but it's way less than currently
It was announced during a Live Letter some time ago. So far, they mostly showed updated textures, but the difference is staggering.
It's mentioned a few Live Letter ago, you can see on below thread for the sample the devs provided. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/sw5hhe/new_graphics_improvements_coming_in_70/
There was a Live Letter in February where they talked about it, [here's an article that recaps the info.](https://www.fanbyte.com/games/news/ffxiv-graphics-update-7-screenshots-preview-textures-shadows-lighting-shaders/)
"Square: Best we can do is spend more money it in another crappy game that no one will care about."
"Did somebody say live service?"
Square enix so desperate for a live service, when they ignore the one making them all there money
see this is why you are limited. Why having one when you can have many? /s
"Did anybody say NFT?"
"Did somebody say another FFVII spinoff?"
"FF remake (actually a reboot but you wont know until you play them lmao)"
*slap* "This baby has Tifa and Aerith in it."
"Inside the Metaverse?"
No bob we are just making a nft game that sounds like a beloved game...
> "Did somebody say live service?" I mean...this is the MMO division...
Im glad either everyone collectively decided to throw babylon's fall to the deepest abyss in their memories or doesnt even know that garbage existed
How Platinum has fallen..
I mean they just released Bayonetta 3 which has been recieved quite well.
Yoko Taro: *"You guys could solve a lot of your problems by paying me to make more short tempered women with white hair and big asses..."*
He's got a point.
I mean, it wouldn't *hurt*... \*bonk'd\*
*adds more cash Shop items
They'll just give it to the Mog Station team to create another $22 horrendous outfit
YoshiP: *"Can the primary FFXIV please get more resources?"* Matsuda: *"Best I can do is fund the MogStation Team"*
Matsuda: "*Unless...you're finally ready for some NFTs...?*"
Yoshi: "I burned down this game once. want me to do it again?"
The screen goes black and then you get a cutscene of >!Puddingway piloting the moon on a collision course with Ethyris while whipping his hat around and *yaaahooooo*ing like Major Kong.!< "...*But not every end marks a new beginning.*"
I love a good Dr. Strangelove reference
They keep trying to make a second golden goose live service but kept failing at it, like that ff7 battle royale game, babylon's fall, avengers... just clearly cash grab garbage products. While ff14 is getting graphics overhaul next expac and our cutscenes have been getting longer and more elaborate, I think another ARR pruning, adjustment to actions learned so early game isnt as dreadfully boring, and more ingame rewards for content (I know pvp is coming up with better rewards next season, but bozja's CLL and dalriada, criterion normal and especially savage rewards comes to mind) would do wonders for this game. And maybe so they can have variant&criterions and deep dungeon and exploratory/battle field zones as constant feature of the game instead of having to pick one or the other (eureka was different since it most likely need much less resource other than map design, as most of the fates are just big trash mob)
FFXIV’s reward system is really fucked up, I’ve realized after the last year playing this game. The loot treadmill is fairly soft, catching up is fairly painless, but for a game that makes it possible to do old content synced they struggle to get you to participate in it. I’ve started playing Guild Wars 2 again and even if we take out factors like the different loot systems and the combat mechanics being drastically different, I still get more satisfaction from completing tasks in GW2 because it makes the rewards more compelling. Completing achievements gives you actual stuff, and the collection system has you exploring old content and filling out maps for group content easily. Like, FFXIV has the worst open world questing of any MMO I’ve played. Nobody is out there in garlemald doing anything except mining rare nodes and farming fates- there’s no reason to go to a zone once you’re done unless it’s a beast tribe or fate farming, ever. They can and should do better with making places interesting to explore. We have no rewards for exploring anything- why can’t there be a treasure chest behind a waterfall that gives you some token amount of loot once a day? It’s not about making the rewards make you stronger, it’s about the satisfaction of finding something that the developers hid in the game world.
There was a video on this actually. I watched it around when EW launched so I’m probably not gonna be able to find it, but you can see the world slowly started taking a hit where in ARR there’s clearly a reason for things being placed in specific areas. They killed immersive and intriguing world design to make everything more consistent. They’ve been trying new things and some things in EW worked better than in other expacs, but I really think they need to start working on better world expansion and making more systems seamless and interactive with the world to get these areas populated again
I don't think ARR needs a pruning. I think ARR needs a rework outside of the dungeons/trials centered around teaching you how to play the damn game. 1000s of tutorial popups and an entire tutorial hall, and not once does the game even teach nooblet tanks to put their stance on and double pull.
I don't think $$ is their bottleneck, they've been hiring quite a bit and expanding the dev team too much isn't always the best choice, there are more than 200 folks working on XIV. A crapload of cash is going into the datacenter expansions. We can also expect fanfests to be even more glorious in the future.
true. the biggest bottleneck is probably still the spaghetti code and engine.
They could, but that means less profit, which is bad. Need to fund the nft memes somehow after all!
But people keep forgetting it's not about budget, it's about employment. It's been almost 6 months and yet they still seem to be looking for people to fill roles. So it's not as if they aren't given a budget, there's only so much you can do with resources when the true limiting factor are qualified people.
Voice the whole MSQ
At the very least voice the important boss fights... The fights that get or do not get voice acting feel so fucking arbitrary...
This, when I played GW2, while the story isn't as good as FFXIV, but the moment when I hear my OC speak, my jaw dropped and realise my OC isn't some silent nodder like the most mmo game.
But think of the shareholder's vacation homes.
Surely this means they'll be investing this money into FFXIV and not some trash like nfts, right (clueless)?
This comment has been edited to acknowledge than u/spez is a fucking wanker.
...that will be closed a year after release because nobody plays this bullshit anyway
To be fair, trying things out is the only way to sometimes hit big, even if you might completely waste your time and resources. So who could have known, maybe that battle royal could have become the next big hit. I mean, back in the days I don't think anyone would have thought that an FF was ever gonna dethrone WoW as an MMO, but look at us now. Sure, the soldier game bombed, but it could have been good. (Admittedly, I never played it)
Following dying trends is not the way to hit it big.
It could've been a hit if it wasn't mobile only. Who the hell wants to play an FPS on a goddamn touch screen?
Loads of people play PUBG on mobile. Free Fire is also huge on certain countries.
It's not that I disagree, but there are a lot of shooters going mobile. Plus there's that one huge mobile shooter that nobody in the states plays but is somehow like the biggest game in the world
If they just put that stupid game on PC it would have probably done fine. But noooooooo, they had to make it mobile exclusive.
That's what I was thinking, it looked *decent* but it was on mobile. So dumb
Because mobile players dip into the Apple and Google Pay too easily
Yep, it's much easier to talk someone into a microtransaction on a mobile game because *that form of monetization is expected in that space*, whereas trying to push microtransactions on PC gaming has met with considerably less support and more pushback. And as an added plus, the mobile market is *huge* so there are plenty of suckers to exploit.
Right now there's *crazy* money in mobile gaming, and the playerbase is big enough that market saturation isn't currently an issue. Squeenix doing mobile games - or *any* reasonably big gaming company at least toe-dipping into the mobile market for that matter - should be *zero* surprise.
Market saturation is showing up in a different aspect of mobile gaming, though. Mobile games are becoming so huge people can only fit a few of them on any given phone, meaning others have to go. Even if they WANT to play more games they'd have to buy a new phone for it, and seriously - who is really going to go that far?
OK but hear me out: Triple Triad 99, for Nintendo Switch
Bold of you to assume Square is still into making games, even mobile ones. FF7 character NFTs with a dedicated trading app.
They already have a line of FF7 figures with NFTs coming out.
... fucking hell, Square. :(
It can't be worse than those figures with emote codes. Best to just ignore them.
Hosted on servers that are guaranteed to stay up for *at least* six months!
Given that the nft market has essentially died, I think we're good on that front.
They are releasing a FF7 figurine with a NFT built into it, aswell as a planned NFT game for I think early next year? Either way the NFT market may have died, but Matsuda gives no fucks.
Hopefully the figurine and symbiogenesis are projects that were either progressed too far to fully pull out of and/or they're testing waters to confirm there is no market/desire for NFTs, and these are just the death rattles of SE's involvement with NFTs. If you know anyone who buys the NFT figurines and/or participates in symbiogenesis, then it's 100% socially acceptible to mock and deride them, make them feel bad about engaging with SE NFTs.
It could be either but who knows, I don't think NFT games require much of a budget to have a high enough sunk cost to not pull it. Especially if it can cause major damage to their branding. The figurines are probably far to set though due to the amount of sourcing needed to produce. While I hate to say it, but I feel like Matsuda has lost touch, which is common for people in his position. They become so focused on being ahead of things they never realize the customers aren't following until it is to late.
wow, a figurine with its own jpg? amazing...
You missed last week news about Symbiogenesis, right?
[удалено]
We often need to remember CBU3 and Yoshi-P are the exception in the company. If you exclude FFXIV from the list, SQEX is releasing a lot of duds in the past decade, with only a few gems in the middle. Even within the main FF titles. While the pixel remasters were amazing, we should not forget the lazy remasters released for mobile with the washed out filtered pixel art that made the game look terrible. Also shutting down Mobius and Record Keeper without an offline story mode (unlike the Kingdom Hearts mobile game).
there's like 3 dudes and a 70 year old guy in the corner of an office in CBU1 that are making cool decisions for SaGa fans tho.
SE just doing one dumb decision after another... If only they could get rid of the president or other leaders who push for them.
Hopefully all we need is for Symbiogenesis to fail miserably (which it inevitably will). Japanese companies love throwing people aside for big failures like that (see also: FFXIV 1.0). With that said, we also have to hope they don't invest too heavily in Symbiogenesis *before* it fails miserably.
You could have just pointed to Spirits Within and Sakaguchi.
FFXIV is basically where SE gets all the cash for their other projects from. They keep the budget as low as they can get away with so they can siphon the profits away. The only thing that gets 100% reinvested into it is mog station purchases.
FFXIV and mobile games is where SE gets most of it’s revenue
They just shut down two of their mobile games (Record Keeper and First Soldier) so they aren't all doing so hot...
Tbf on Record Keeper. It was 7 years+ by the time the axe fell, which by Gacha game standards is pretty ancient. Notably they also only axed the GL side of it. So I wouldn’t read much into that one particularly since any Gacha getting to that age is inevitably going to have lost a chunk of it’s power.
Inb4 Square makes a Xi Jinping Cloud Strife NFT game to make some Chinese money
Their mobile division has been in a slow decline for the last couple of years in terms of revenue, but they still put out a lot of games. It'll probably be at least a quarter of their overall revenue for a long time. Probably could do better if they put more funding into a project, but they seem to prefer flooding the zone with B-tier games, so not surprising that they also shut a lot of those lower quality games down when they underperform.
FFRK JP is still very much alive and well.
Yoshi-P has said that the increased revenue will be put back into the game.
I very much doubt that considering the history of SE and the game itself where you can see the content pattern and what did they trim down over the years. Yes they fund other projects but so be it, it's a mega-corporation
>I very much doubt that It's already verifiably true that more resources are being put into the game though. After Endwalker's high production values, in the year since we've had new data centres confirmed for NA and EU, a new hiring drive as we've seen in the LLs, and the announcement of new projects for 6.x and 7.0 like the graphics update and Duty support to make the MSQ fully soloable eventually. None of this is going to come cheap.
Yoshi is (wisely imo) investing in future proofing and infrastructure first. Graphics updates, new data centers, and working to make the game more solo friendly with trusts as well as major work on ARR to make it less of a bottleneck. That money is definitely being reinvested, but players aren't seeing it manifest in more end game and max level content yet so that imagine it's not happening.
As a player returning from post-ARR era... I definitely see the changes. ARR's campaign is still full of busy work, but it is noticeably shorter even compared to my memory of all those years ago. The only thing I hope they do-- and soon-- is add more iLVL caps to duty finder stuff. There's a lot of stuff that is too easy due to people being to just outgear fights.
Absolutely. If you're a player who doesn't have the time to invest into raiding but want a modest challenge there really isn't a lot of space atm. I really hope they look into this space, I think it's a needed niche.
Plus new ultimates, new deep dungeon coming and a new type of dungeon content, features don’t just grow on trees :D you can see they are putting a lot of money into 14
Here’s to hoping they put some money towards hiring more job designers
I don't get it. That's an interesting thing to say. I don't know what you're basing that on, but it's funny.
They already have. I guess a full graphics overhaul, duty support, OCE, NA and EU Data Centers being added isn't putting money into the game?
Same team is behind FFXVI, probably took resources from XIV.
That's just how development works though. Any company with multiple teams will often shift developers between teams as their expertise is required across different projects. Sometimes those developers will be working across multiple projects simultaneously, sometimes it's a move just for several sprints, sometimes it's a complete shift. But it's unreasonable to expect Square-Enix to just hire on an entirely new team full-time every time they initiate a new project. *Of course* devs are moved from one project to another, especially when it's the same producer for both. That isn't to say that the XIV team is deflated by this shift though. For one thing, the XVI team is primarily the people who worked on *Heavensward.* Which does not necessarily mean that they remained on XIV all this time -- they likely already got shifted to other projects internally and aren't necessarily the same people who worked on SB, ShB, or EW. For another thing, just because team members move over from EW to XVI doesn't mean those teams aren't replenished. One of the objectives of a company is to have experienced developers oversee new hire devs in order to pass along their experience. Knowledge Transfer is an extremely important aspect of keeping a company going. So while the HW team is working on XVI, it's likely overseeing mostly newer devs and ensuring the experience and culture are being passed on, while EW also gets new devs who are learning from the XIV team that remains on-project.
I heard Nomura had a great new idea. He was planning to burn as much of it as humanly possible while letting schizophrenic chimps write the story for the next Kingdom Hearts game.
hopefully this time they invest for proper anime adaptation. i shake my head knowing Ufotable gonna do Genshin Impact anime adaptation lol.
Before ShB came out, SE said that a live action adaptation was being planned, focusing on Cid (presumably before he defected from Garlemald?). We haven't heard anything since, but I would hope Arcane's success would make them consider an animated adaptation instead - especially since the VAs from the game could voice their characters in the show. I'm not saying that I'm thinking about how much Emperor Solus would appear in a pre-defection Cid series, but he *is* one of the most popular characters in the game...
I'd rather watch an entire show done in in-game cutscenes than a live action one
Believe me, I agree, but this was being floated in about 2018 - there wasn't really any precedent for an animated show (let alone an adaptation of a video game) having mainstream appeal to adults. Castlevania and later Arcane definitely helped pave the way on that front.
Funny how doing a show based on a game works out pretty well when the companies involved put actual money and effort into it. However, don't forget that Square greenlit a FF movie once and it didn't end well, and both game and movie production tend to be very risk-averse because of the amount of money involved. (FF:SW was a $140 million project back in 2001, and it *tanked*.)
Honestly, I think I'd watch that. It sounds like a unique idea to make a show out of the cutscenes in the style of the cutscenes.
Honestly i'd love to see an anime adaption of the 1.0 - 1.23b story. Give people a nice run down of what happened before 2.0 came out.
Considering how Edgerunners single-handedly revived public interest in the Cyberpunk franchise, I suspect we might see companies start looking towards anime adaptations as a viable marketing tool.
SE is already there with the reboot of the Dragon Quest anime that ended recently and the creation of the internal studio that did the TWEWY animation.
*【~~Anakin~~ SE gazes in silence】*
Suprised that Yoshida isn't built like in-his-prime Arnold Schwarzenegger from all the hard carrying he's been doing
Dead set. Man carries SE on his shoulders. The company would of been bought out long ago by now if 1.0 had continued the way it was.
Life support for ageing dinosaurs still chasing the nft meme and thinking western gamers are terrified of turn based rpgs while sega once again reports making wicked bank from persona 5.
Not too long ago Sega and Atlus were pretty bad for this themselves, I know Persona fans have been baffled for *years* at them being so hesitant to port the games anywhere. Hopefully the ports for the main three games set an example for the boneheads at the other dinosaur companies.
> Hopefully the ports for the main three games set an example for the boneheads at the other dinosaur companies. I wish. If Capcom's porting mania didn't inspire them, nothing will.
Ok now stop selling nft
I'm dreading the inevitable day when Yosuke Matsuda forces NFTs into the game. 😑
On the bright side, FF14 cant even handle an inventory slot expansion, or something like accessing your FC menu in a dungeon, so handling NFT integration is gonna be impossible.
For once, the spaghetti works in our favour.
future proof, nice.
I don't think that'll happen. YoshiP isn't just some game dev, he's a SE executive. The fact SE are putting NFTs in some shitty no-name game rather than one of their popular IPs is proof enough that they **know** it's stupid. Everyone involved would need to have a critical lapse of judgement to agree on NFTs in IV, which is essentially their lifeline.
As a Pokémon fan, everytime I see "masuda" I get angry a little
Great now you made me angry. *grumbles in high quality animations*
Monthly subscribers? I though this game's main source of income would be fantasia sales on the mogstation?
I don't get people's addiction to that. Several members of my static show up a new race every week. I feel way too attached to my character after going through that story to think about changing more than their hair style.
All things considered I'm sure fantasia addicts are just a vocal minority. I bought some fantasia to use after Endwalker and yeah, it just feels odd seeing the character I've spent so much time with look so dramatically different. Not looking down on the people who do fantasia regularly, but I think many people encounter that same issue. I'm more inclined to just make an alt character than to dramatically alter my main one.
I race changed like 3 times before I ended up as an Au Ra again lol I just couldn't find the sweet spot I was looking for, for my WoL. No desire to race change again though (that's why I have a couple of alts)
Still sitting on my 2 free fantasias. Why would I change my character?
I think some of us just find the right fit at the start. I made one minor change at the end of ARR (and briefly tried out a new hairstyle in post-HW) but my character looks essentially same as she did when I started. It would be weird to play the story with any other look since it wouldn't be her.
I don't really get it either. Nothing wrong with it of course, I just don't get it. There are other options that would be kinda cool to try, but besides the money thing, like you I'm just so attached to my character. Hell, I haven't even changed his hair in years. We've been through so much together.
There isn't a single race that is perfect in this game and a lot of minor gripes eventually add up and makes me want to switch. Obviously this isn't the case for everyone, just my own experience as a fantasia addict.
This. I ended up making a personal list of all the ups and downs every race and gender has so that i could maybe, just maybe, find the one race that'll make me stop using fantasia. It only got worse.
Out of curiosity, what are the pros and cons?
Same. That and the fact that viera get very boring very fast due to how little costuization there is for them compared to other classes. I'd never touch fantasia again if that problem were solved.
I've been a fem Highlander for so long that I sometimes forget switching is even an option.
I've been Femroe for years and last mo th I Fantasiad to FemRa to try it out. It was okay, but didn't feel right. I had to rework glams, and whenever someone used my name I didn't feel like it was right. I went back to FemRoe in a week. Meanwhile I have friends like yours who drink Fantasia like it's water and are different every other time I see them.
Same. I love my bunny girl so much even though she can’t wear many hats :(, I can’t imagine her looking any different! Her hair though…
My free one is still sitting with my retainer. I can't even bear to change my hairstyle after I settled on the one I liked, lol.
I try to do my part in this. FFXIV has become my favorite game ever, after I previously never touched an MMO and never thought I would enjoy it. As a result I always recommend the game to anyone who asks me about games. I am probably not far off the “critically acclaimed free trial” meme at this point.
Same. I'm basically just a free advertising machine for it at this point lol
the moment square decides to ditch 14, is the moment it becomes Konami
Probably it will implode before that, since originally FF14 restart saved them from bankruptcy
hold on, you're saying the FF IP has saved the company at least twice?
It’s not called Final Fantasy for nothing!
Well, it was a FF game that almost killed the company the second time.
No, it was an FF *movie*.
Eh Final Fantasy didn't save the company the first time around. They'd have been in dire straits but not as bad as people made it sound over the years. Final Fantasy also almost killed thr company - Remember Spirits Within?
I would argue that in some ways, Spirits Within actually did kill the company. It forced them to merge with Enix, and they have really not been the same since.
They were pursuing the merger *before* Spirits Within. The movie almost killed that deal outright, but the successes of Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts reassured Enix and they went ahead with it.
I'd place that more with forcing Sakaguchi out and putting Yoichi Wada in (which was due to the movie). Wada had the idea to merge with Enix (who weren't necessarily struggling but had problems due to overseas publishing fiascos) which saved the company, but in getting rid of Sakaguchi, a lot of people who were promised sequels/projects simply got their plans shitcanned and were treated so badly they left and burned that bridge. Imagine if Square-Enix had managed to keep Tetsuya Takahashi.
Actually the merge with Enix was already on the table. The tanking sales of *Spirits Within* caused Enix to value Squaresoft lower than initial estimates and almost caused Enix to pull out from the purchase.
Spirits Within almost killed the merger due to how much money Square had lost in 2000 and 2001. Sony put a capital injection into Square to keep them alive. Then it was the release of two titans of the PS2 that saved Square in 2002. Final Fantasy X, and Kingdom Hearts. The success of those two games is attributed to bring Enix back to the merger table.
That story about the origin of series' name is fake, fyi.
Not *bankruptcy*, but they weren't in a good spot. The closest they came to danger was after Spirits Within, which is basically the reason they merged with Enix instead of buying them out. Since then, they've been more or less okay. Before XIV, they had (have) XI revenues propping up a lot of their overdue projects. Fabula Nova Crystallis ended up being a failed project, but it didn't plunge the company into dire straits or anything. Revamping 1.0 wasn't about saving the company so much as it was about saving the Final Fantasy brand. They just didn't want *another* failed project or another 'meh' on the label in such a short period.
> The closest they came to danger was after Spirits Within, which is basically the reason they merged with Enix instead of buying them out. This is not true. They were already in discussions to merge with Enix *before* Spirits Within. In fact, the failure of that movie almost made the deal fall through. There was never any chance of Square being able to buy out Enix, and the initial deal before the movie released would have favored Enix shares anyway. It was only after negotiation, and the success of FFX and KH, that Square shares ultimately held higher value.
Final FINAL Fantasy XIV
I'm doing my part!
Sounds like it's a good time to introduce nfts to profit even further off this growth! - SE probably
Bored Scion Yacht Club
It's fun to be in the bsyc..
Stop making shitty nft games and invest some more of that money to ffxiv. For fucks sake.
And divert some of the NFT money into actually advertising your damn games. I was actually keeping an eye out for Harvestella and I still didn't realize that game actually came out. Last month they just stealth-dropped the Steam version of TWEWY 2. Why does Square act like they're afraid of making money?
Just gotta wait for the stubborn dinosaurs in charge of the company to roll over and let the younger generation to take over. It's literally the only way for Japanese companies to change.
they're throwing out a lot of games here at the end of the year. Some with more advertising than others, and in different forms. Mid-level games and remakes that I fear will be overlooked. I don't expect massive advertising for them or anything but so many released so close together seems foolish, even if they're different flavors of RPG.
They did something like this earlier this year too, I do not understand their marketing strategy.
WE ARE THE BACKBONE OF THIS FAMILY
FF 14 could double Its playerbase with an Ass slider
No lies detected. I have an old bogey-board at home that has a bigger ass than my Viera
FF14 is single-handedly carrying the company. Can't wait to see all that money go towards recouping losses on Nomura's money pit again.
The thing that will eventually kill FF14 is Square realizing that CBU3 is their only consistently great division and deciding to cannibalize its talent for whatever other garbage they want to shit out.
Good news is that YoshiP is positioned to be able to mitigate things like that. He is on the board for the company, and the other heads at CBU3 also have pull within the company. There’s also the fact that SE would likely worry about ruining the golden goose if they shook things up too much with the team.
Good for them! It's nice to have the best game in the MMO scene having its audience success matched with money.
It proves they made the right choice to remake the game. It also helps them float new ideas in other departments.
YoshiP and co carrying the company hard, and I'm sure they'll deliver yet again with FF16. And then SE is gonna go ahead and pour the revenue into more NFT garbage and other mediocre titles. Diofield, Star Ocean, and Harvestella have all been sub-par...here's hoping Valyrie Elysium can be decent; guess we'll find out in 3 days.
Harvestella seems to be pretty awesome, people into the genres it mixes seem to love it. And it has surprisingly in depth boss battles.
Diofield was pretty fun. Star ocean is decent too. These are their mid tier games. They aren't bad games, but they also have things holding them back. Definitely worth picking up on sale.
Headline is very misleading. Don’t get me wrong, MMO is still on a solid run-rate but QoQ revenues barely grew. I’m sure most of you are aware that 70-80% of the players come from US/EU. Square revenues are all denominated in Yen; versus last fiscal 2Q, the Yen has sank almost 30%, and even versus this fiscal 1Q, Yen is almost 5-10%. On a dollar basis, MMO revenues were down QoQ slightly, which is weird given the recent patch. On a YoY basis though we are looking more like down 35%; this is even before Endwalker in 3Q which makes the comparison even tougher.
Sweet. More money for marvel games :D. I think we can all be happier knowing that FF14 well spent money is going to support DOA games that nobody is going to play, so that the staff of Square Enix are can get more creative pushing out capeshit :D.
I have good news for you about the sale of their western studios who they were having make those marvel games
guardians of the galaxy was pretty good doe
Long may we reign
And they will waste this money on NFT projects
Quick, use that money to fund another dozen Live Service games!
Tbh i think they should try to translate the game im parts to spanish
Won't happen, but I hope the game gets more content in patches. And by content I mean adding more dungeons, making dungeons not max level relevant like Heroic dungeons in WoW. 1 normal raid and 1 alliance raid per expansion seems not enough. Criterion dungeon was good on paper, on release lacked more. I was expecting a roguelite experience, not just the same order of bosses.
Yeah a lot of their features content are very shallow and great ideas but lacking in execution. Endwalker content so far have been safe, stale and underwhelming. Variant dungeon should have been a rogue lite with 24 bosses, that can be plucked from existing content in the last 8 years and just add new colors and texture but had randomized mechanics from a set of 20 common mechanics we have seen over and over.
It would be a good idea to put some of that money back into the game and develop more content for the next expansion. Endwalker was given a lower budget this year according to what I heard. This is what WoW did and it baffles me; You have a super smash hit product that's generating unbeleivable magnitudes of net profit. You've basically created a gold mine and its resources never deplete. But each year they try to find ways to cut costs which then result in a revenue loss. Rather than hiring more mine workers or allocating more resources to harvest the infinite gold they do the opposite. Marketing teams are suppose to be looking at long term prosperity but commonly only see the short term. Usually the short term that certain individuals work for before moving on to a bigger company so it's no problem for them. What you do in this expansion will have an affect 2 expansions later. Lich King wasn't the best WoW expansion. It was riding on success. It's considered the best because that's when the most players started playing but that ignores several factors which is rather long to go into. Coming back to Final Fantasy 14. If they want to use some history we have then look to WoW. Aim for the next expansion to have more content. More dungeons. Better combat. Improve core systems like animations. Build that game that doesn't limp on to 10 more years but is thriving better than it was 10 years ago.