If Dragon Age: Veilguard is a game where HR is in the room...
then Final Fantasy XIV is a game where the accountant is in the room.
EVERY single game mechanic in this game is made in a way where you can obviously see the effects of cost optimization.
Take for instance: why are (high-end) raids so stale and why do they reuse the same patterns over and over again? People think the answer is because they want players to pick up the mechanics instantly. Sure. That's what Yoshi P tells you, which is half-true.
What they neglected to tell you is that a big reason they did this is that it makes the raids easier to balance and debug. Do you remember when there are bugs after bugs at the start of EW, like the housing lottery bugs, the login queue bug, and the TOP bugs? That's because they transferred a lot of their in-house QA elsewhere, and it allows CBU3 to slash production costs for FF14.
Another reason is that doing so allows them to use pre-existing code and animations, thereby allowing them to get away with only having two or three raid content designers, compared to WoW having far more.
Why is deep dungeon just the same concept with a new coat of paint every generation? HoH was barely changed from PotD. EO was barely changed from PotD. Once again, because it's far cheaper to do so.
Why is field content full of FATEs? Once again it's for the same reason.
Innovation is costly, and CBU3 intends to recycle the same ideas again and again until the end of this game's shelf life if they can get away with it.
A huge part of this is also because they cannot afford to hire more programmers. Many SE titles lean into their competitive advantage, which is visuals and graphics. Because they can afford to hire a lot of artists and writers, since there's a ton of them looking for jobs in Japan. Programmers? Much harder. Those would much rather emigrate and work in Silicon Valley. This is clearly reflected in FF14, where for too long we have dungeons that are spectacle over substance. Even in FF16, dungeons are still glorified corridors with next to no substance, especially when you compare it to dungeons from Western action RPGs like GoW: Ragnarok, where they fill dungeons with puzzles and nonlinearity.
This doesn't just affect gameplay content. It also affects job design. They have stated that simpler, homogenized jobs allow them to cut time spent on QA and balancing. And yet we still have results like Pictomancer dominating the caster role anyways, because they are not maintaining the same amount of time spent on QA and balancing, thereby increasing the quality of such balancing. They're just using it as a way to reduce the time spent on balancing to cut costs, so the balancing today in EW and DT is just as atrocious as the balancing in HW.
It's really ironic that the issues that delivered 1.0 are the same issues that plague this game today. It's probably not even out of malice, however. Square Enix is a struggling company and they have an extremely hard time finding talent. Therefore, they literally are incapable of making FF14 better than what it is right now. They have to cut costs from FF14 because of their disaster after disaster (in terms of sales): Forspoken, Marvel's Avengers, FF16, Babylon's Fall... At the same time they also cannot find any programming talent that can actually code up all the innovative content that is lacking in this game. So the only thing left to do is to rely on the writers and artists, hoping the spectacle and story can hide the lack of substance in this game. But even the story is now falling...
If you are hoping that they will divert resources back to FF14 or that they'll come up with better, diversified jobs, or come up with amazing improved combat encounters with brand new mechanics... Don't. Square Enix is not in a financial position to deliver any of that for the foreseeable future.
Continue reading...
then Final Fantasy XIV is a game where the accountant is in the room.
EVERY single game mechanic in this game is made in a way where you can obviously see the effects of cost optimization.
Take for instance: why are (high-end) raids so stale and why do they reuse the same patterns over and over again? People think the answer is because they want players to pick up the mechanics instantly. Sure. That's what Yoshi P tells you, which is half-true.
What they neglected to tell you is that a big reason they did this is that it makes the raids easier to balance and debug. Do you remember when there are bugs after bugs at the start of EW, like the housing lottery bugs, the login queue bug, and the TOP bugs? That's because they transferred a lot of their in-house QA elsewhere, and it allows CBU3 to slash production costs for FF14.
Another reason is that doing so allows them to use pre-existing code and animations, thereby allowing them to get away with only having two or three raid content designers, compared to WoW having far more.
Why is deep dungeon just the same concept with a new coat of paint every generation? HoH was barely changed from PotD. EO was barely changed from PotD. Once again, because it's far cheaper to do so.
Why is field content full of FATEs? Once again it's for the same reason.
Innovation is costly, and CBU3 intends to recycle the same ideas again and again until the end of this game's shelf life if they can get away with it.
A huge part of this is also because they cannot afford to hire more programmers. Many SE titles lean into their competitive advantage, which is visuals and graphics. Because they can afford to hire a lot of artists and writers, since there's a ton of them looking for jobs in Japan. Programmers? Much harder. Those would much rather emigrate and work in Silicon Valley. This is clearly reflected in FF14, where for too long we have dungeons that are spectacle over substance. Even in FF16, dungeons are still glorified corridors with next to no substance, especially when you compare it to dungeons from Western action RPGs like GoW: Ragnarok, where they fill dungeons with puzzles and nonlinearity.
This doesn't just affect gameplay content. It also affects job design. They have stated that simpler, homogenized jobs allow them to cut time spent on QA and balancing. And yet we still have results like Pictomancer dominating the caster role anyways, because they are not maintaining the same amount of time spent on QA and balancing, thereby increasing the quality of such balancing. They're just using it as a way to reduce the time spent on balancing to cut costs, so the balancing today in EW and DT is just as atrocious as the balancing in HW.
It's really ironic that the issues that delivered 1.0 are the same issues that plague this game today. It's probably not even out of malice, however. Square Enix is a struggling company and they have an extremely hard time finding talent. Therefore, they literally are incapable of making FF14 better than what it is right now. They have to cut costs from FF14 because of their disaster after disaster (in terms of sales): Forspoken, Marvel's Avengers, FF16, Babylon's Fall... At the same time they also cannot find any programming talent that can actually code up all the innovative content that is lacking in this game. So the only thing left to do is to rely on the writers and artists, hoping the spectacle and story can hide the lack of substance in this game. But even the story is now falling...
If you are hoping that they will divert resources back to FF14 or that they'll come up with better, diversified jobs, or come up with amazing improved combat encounters with brand new mechanics... Don't. Square Enix is not in a financial position to deliver any of that for the foreseeable future.
Continue reading...