I'm making this since we already have a bunch of other opinions currently about Forked Tower: Magic as well as North Horn in general. However, from what I've read it's the sheer disappointment that everyone is running into when it comes to learning from South Horn.
My opinion on the matter is this: How on earth did the Development Team skip over the feedback we gave and only consider Forked Tower and NOT the systems they made as a whole for CEs and FATEs?
It's something I genuinely fail to understand because going into Evercold, they said they were going to make it so that the game will change to consider people's time. Repeating the same mistakes wastes people's time because they don't like being on a treadmill non-stop.
So, let's get a good reminder as to the 'why' South Horn failed:
1) South Horn failed because of the monotonous grind that was a constant. No brakes, no time to talk. Just grind.
This is the biggest offender in regards to how South Horn "felt" to most. Where Eureka actually incentivized community up to Hydatos and Bozja to an extent with its addition of Solo Encounter Duels plus public Normal Mode raids, South Horn threw the baby out with the bathwater. They took two unique ideas and decided "Yeah, let's throw that away - but not Baldesion Arsenal! Let's keep that." Like sure, we had Forked Tower Blood - but that was a bigger issue that was addressed by Magic when people en masse complained about even getting into it, let alone getting their foot past the Demon Wall door boss in a PUG.
They could've kept Duels in and kept things interesting along with having breaks between FATEs so that people aren't constantly pushed in one direction time and again, let alone incentivizing a balance between Gold and Silver.
2) The Currency Balance was a failure on South Horn due to FATEs/CE only granting Silver.
This was probably one of the biggest blunders they could've done in the history of Expedition Areas. The Currency system was something that was introduced back in Eureka with the Anima Crystals, which were exchanged for the Relic Armor and Weapons in particular; Bozja followed the same concept with Coins. But South Horn? They took it in a far different direction. Two different currencies, two different systems to get them.
Just...why? Let's take a look at Silver first. Silver is obtained by completing FATEs and CEs, and tends to be the easiest currency to farm; however, when you look at Gold, it's antithetical in nature. Gold could only be acquired from Mobs who are of equal level or higher to you until they patched in adding it to Pots and Bunnies, which only put a band-aid on the issue at hand. This didn't do much at all considering the gameplay loop was centralized around FATE/CE grinding, the only thing you could ever do in South Horn. This caused issues because one currency was not being accumulated naturally over the other, hence why people made parties to mob grind while also losing out on CEs and FATEs - for the people who had maxed stuff? This *was* the end-game outside of Forked Tower since Silvers were easy to come by; the gold wasn't.
3) The Importance of Community
This is where I point the finger at what made South Horn suck. The gameplay loop for South Horn during the leveling process was the following flowchart:
- Kill FATE, Kill FATE, Go to CE Location, Kill CE, Kill FATE, Kill FATE, Kill CE, repeat...
This became a monotonous grind that was further exacerbated with some of the community's gripes with how the FATEs died so quickly, whether it be through bad FATE balancing(i.e. 3 people killed this FATE, so next spawn will have very little HP; 30 people show up to merc it within a minute) or through CEs requiring you to stand in place for a whole 2 minutes just for it to show up; and you're forced to choose between Pots and say an important CE that drops a Soul Shard like Berserker.
Let's rollback to Bozja real quick while we're on the topic of CEs. So, back in Bozja, Critical Engagements were driven by a quick-enlistment feature where when a CE was going to show up, you had a button that you could press to add yourself to a list of people engaging in it, up to 48. If there were more than what the CE could hold, it'd turn into a lottery. So if there were 70 people who wanted in, 22 would miss it. However, you could access from anywhere on the map. If you were chosen, you'd be teleported instantly when the timer ran out to the location the CE is.
Leaving this out of South Horn was a major mistake because people were accustomed to it and could do other things while waiting on the CE to pop. Having to walk there from teleport is actually a significantly worse experience especially when you're trying to kill a FATE on time.
Also, remember Gold? That doesn't drop from CEs, where Bozja actually went a step forward and dropped Bozjan Coins which you could exchange for equipment. Where Silver is the common currency from this, Gold should be included in the CEs and FATEs as well to facilitate both currencies in a natural fashion instead of how they are now.
Now on the topic of community, it's important that people have time to talk in-between FATEs and CEs. Communication is a wonderful thing, since it not only allows players to pass information between each other, but also can lead to silly interactions that make the game fun on its own. Eureka did this perfectly throughout all of its zones(minus Hydatos). The issue is that when you create a system that constantly churns out FATEs every minute, it gives the player little time to even talk as they're busy pressing buttons to play the game - there's no interaction to be had unless you're sitting at a CE or in camp doing nothing.
People would communicate timers for Notorious Monsters in Eureka all the time, and mobbing was a natural feature in leveling when NMs either were too high for you to handle or were doing it with a party to progress. In South Horn, none of that existed after the first few days.
It's why pacing is an important part of the experience, and as much as this is accommodating to people who have little time on their hands with only 2 hours a day or so, in the broader scope it actually harms the experience. You'll get parties every now and then through CE, but then they'll disband and just go back to farming FATEs. It's not a good thing, and has made it a problem for Expeditionary Areas going forward.
4) Forked Tower: Blood
So, just to recap on this real quick, Forked Tower: Blood was supposed to be this big raid for the Occult Crescent. Given what Bozja had presented and made the raids accessible to the crowd who normally wouldn't step into say the Arcadion or such, it naturally flowed into it once you hit that milestone for the story. Forked Tower, however, failed to do this.
To enter Forked Tower: Blood, you needed a currency bought with Silver or Gold pieces to enter. It cost one to enter, and was only used on the pavilion in the center of the map - yet that was the biggest issue. People who wanted to do it? Couldn't get in. The max was 48 people. I mentioned above how Bozja made it so that there's a lottery if it goes above a player limit: It does the same with entering Forked Tower, and it was a repeat of the mistake of Baldesion Arsenal, where people fought over portals to get into BA.
This also caused issues for people popping straight into Tower parties before they patched it, since you would get randoms who were wanting to try Tower only to get past Demon Wall - and then die. When they had resurrections left, organized groups would leave them on the floor and move on because they believed them to be dead weight due to inexperience. The other fault was that Forked Tower was *not* by any means a raid on the level of Castrum Lacus Latore or The Dalriada - it was more on the level of an Extreme Trial. This caused Forked Tower to die quite quickly and was resorted to Discord communities for those who wanted to even make an attempt at clearing it.
5) Phantom Jobs
This is probably the last system I'll touch on since this was baked into Occult Crescent in the first place. In general, the Phantom Job System looks great on paper, but there are some issues that plague it from being excellent in execution. When you first start, you start as a Freelancer; the Freelancer gets Levels from every Job it Masters, and for every Job Mastered, you get an additive 2% Damage and Healing Increase. This is incremental, and can stack up to quite a lot of damage as you level Phantom Jobs. What's more, each Phantom Job has their unique kit that can mesh well with certain jobs.
For instance, Warrior and Berserker go exquisitely well together because of the fact that Warrior can use its Invuln, activate Berserker's ability Berserk, and then proceed to use any damage it took to deliver an extreme blow that can hit for millions of damage when done right. Some of the jobs felt satisfying to use; but some? Not so much.
What Phantom Jobs introduced were great as a concept, but there was just *one* thing missing: customization. You see, both Bozja and Eureka allowed players to customize their kits accordingly to what job they were playing through Actions they gained or through items used in the case of Bozja. This gave them different ways to play the game and was what made both Eureka Pyros onward and Bozja better iterations of themselves. Occult Crescent however fails to do this. In case people do not know one of Final Fantasy V's core systems, it was the customization of abilities that actually was at the core of that game, and was what it was praised for. Here in Occult Crescent? It is oddly missing.
Something that is core to the Final Fantasy V game in XIV's iteration of flavoring Final Fantasy V into a theme attraction absolutely fell on its face by not adding this component. Customization would not only award people's time and dedication, but would also make combat a lot easier to handle such as having a Raise on hand while also being able to use offensive abilities from multiple different jobs that fit what job you were playing which, mind, Freelancer levels off jobs you Master - so why couldn't it get customization added?
Irregardless, while it wasn't dead on arrival, it died too quickly for it to be considered "long content" because of not only the restrictions, but also the other issues that plagued Occult Crescent in its first iteration.
Now that we've gone over what made South Horn so bad, let's see what North Horn actually -
North Horn
- Same CE/FATE Grind
- Same Currency Division(now with Chests!)
- Same Pavilion Issue(No Currency Required though!)
- Same Phantom Job Issue(except Freelancer can let you swap mid-combat at Full Mastery)
- Readjusted Forked Tower into Normal and Extreme Modes
...yeah. This didn't change much did it? All they did was slap a new coat of paint on content that should have added more functionality. At best? They barely even learned from their previous mistakes - in fact, I'd almost want to say they didn't learn at all outside of the Forked Tower fiasco everyone yelled quite loudly about throughout all languages.
So I'd like to ask this question directly to those that design Exploration Areas for us in the future: Why do you not improve systems that are perceived as bad and repeat it in the next area when you get feedback from the patch launch?
I'd like an honest answer to that question since Dawntrail has been littered with repeated mistakes in its large-scale content - Cosmic Exploration included. This isn't to preface anything about Evercold though, so please keep that in mind when responding if you've read this far down.
For those who didn't read:
TL;DR Occult Crescent North Horn failed to address the problems with the Exploration Zone as a whole and instead gave us more of the same - and for those wanting to think "We'll expect this same slop in Evercold" you should rethink about that since by the time Evercold comes out they would've had time to process all this feedback into the next Exploration they do.
Continue reading...
My opinion on the matter is this: How on earth did the Development Team skip over the feedback we gave and only consider Forked Tower and NOT the systems they made as a whole for CEs and FATEs?
It's something I genuinely fail to understand because going into Evercold, they said they were going to make it so that the game will change to consider people's time. Repeating the same mistakes wastes people's time because they don't like being on a treadmill non-stop.
So, let's get a good reminder as to the 'why' South Horn failed:
1) South Horn failed because of the monotonous grind that was a constant. No brakes, no time to talk. Just grind.
This is the biggest offender in regards to how South Horn "felt" to most. Where Eureka actually incentivized community up to Hydatos and Bozja to an extent with its addition of Solo Encounter Duels plus public Normal Mode raids, South Horn threw the baby out with the bathwater. They took two unique ideas and decided "Yeah, let's throw that away - but not Baldesion Arsenal! Let's keep that." Like sure, we had Forked Tower Blood - but that was a bigger issue that was addressed by Magic when people en masse complained about even getting into it, let alone getting their foot past the Demon Wall door boss in a PUG.
They could've kept Duels in and kept things interesting along with having breaks between FATEs so that people aren't constantly pushed in one direction time and again, let alone incentivizing a balance between Gold and Silver.
2) The Currency Balance was a failure on South Horn due to FATEs/CE only granting Silver.
This was probably one of the biggest blunders they could've done in the history of Expedition Areas. The Currency system was something that was introduced back in Eureka with the Anima Crystals, which were exchanged for the Relic Armor and Weapons in particular; Bozja followed the same concept with Coins. But South Horn? They took it in a far different direction. Two different currencies, two different systems to get them.
Just...why? Let's take a look at Silver first. Silver is obtained by completing FATEs and CEs, and tends to be the easiest currency to farm; however, when you look at Gold, it's antithetical in nature. Gold could only be acquired from Mobs who are of equal level or higher to you until they patched in adding it to Pots and Bunnies, which only put a band-aid on the issue at hand. This didn't do much at all considering the gameplay loop was centralized around FATE/CE grinding, the only thing you could ever do in South Horn. This caused issues because one currency was not being accumulated naturally over the other, hence why people made parties to mob grind while also losing out on CEs and FATEs - for the people who had maxed stuff? This *was* the end-game outside of Forked Tower since Silvers were easy to come by; the gold wasn't.
3) The Importance of Community
This is where I point the finger at what made South Horn suck. The gameplay loop for South Horn during the leveling process was the following flowchart:
- Kill FATE, Kill FATE, Go to CE Location, Kill CE, Kill FATE, Kill FATE, Kill CE, repeat...
This became a monotonous grind that was further exacerbated with some of the community's gripes with how the FATEs died so quickly, whether it be through bad FATE balancing(i.e. 3 people killed this FATE, so next spawn will have very little HP; 30 people show up to merc it within a minute) or through CEs requiring you to stand in place for a whole 2 minutes just for it to show up; and you're forced to choose between Pots and say an important CE that drops a Soul Shard like Berserker.
Let's rollback to Bozja real quick while we're on the topic of CEs. So, back in Bozja, Critical Engagements were driven by a quick-enlistment feature where when a CE was going to show up, you had a button that you could press to add yourself to a list of people engaging in it, up to 48. If there were more than what the CE could hold, it'd turn into a lottery. So if there were 70 people who wanted in, 22 would miss it. However, you could access from anywhere on the map. If you were chosen, you'd be teleported instantly when the timer ran out to the location the CE is.
Leaving this out of South Horn was a major mistake because people were accustomed to it and could do other things while waiting on the CE to pop. Having to walk there from teleport is actually a significantly worse experience especially when you're trying to kill a FATE on time.
Also, remember Gold? That doesn't drop from CEs, where Bozja actually went a step forward and dropped Bozjan Coins which you could exchange for equipment. Where Silver is the common currency from this, Gold should be included in the CEs and FATEs as well to facilitate both currencies in a natural fashion instead of how they are now.
Now on the topic of community, it's important that people have time to talk in-between FATEs and CEs. Communication is a wonderful thing, since it not only allows players to pass information between each other, but also can lead to silly interactions that make the game fun on its own. Eureka did this perfectly throughout all of its zones(minus Hydatos). The issue is that when you create a system that constantly churns out FATEs every minute, it gives the player little time to even talk as they're busy pressing buttons to play the game - there's no interaction to be had unless you're sitting at a CE or in camp doing nothing.
People would communicate timers for Notorious Monsters in Eureka all the time, and mobbing was a natural feature in leveling when NMs either were too high for you to handle or were doing it with a party to progress. In South Horn, none of that existed after the first few days.
It's why pacing is an important part of the experience, and as much as this is accommodating to people who have little time on their hands with only 2 hours a day or so, in the broader scope it actually harms the experience. You'll get parties every now and then through CE, but then they'll disband and just go back to farming FATEs. It's not a good thing, and has made it a problem for Expeditionary Areas going forward.
4) Forked Tower: Blood
So, just to recap on this real quick, Forked Tower: Blood was supposed to be this big raid for the Occult Crescent. Given what Bozja had presented and made the raids accessible to the crowd who normally wouldn't step into say the Arcadion or such, it naturally flowed into it once you hit that milestone for the story. Forked Tower, however, failed to do this.
To enter Forked Tower: Blood, you needed a currency bought with Silver or Gold pieces to enter. It cost one to enter, and was only used on the pavilion in the center of the map - yet that was the biggest issue. People who wanted to do it? Couldn't get in. The max was 48 people. I mentioned above how Bozja made it so that there's a lottery if it goes above a player limit: It does the same with entering Forked Tower, and it was a repeat of the mistake of Baldesion Arsenal, where people fought over portals to get into BA.
This also caused issues for people popping straight into Tower parties before they patched it, since you would get randoms who were wanting to try Tower only to get past Demon Wall - and then die. When they had resurrections left, organized groups would leave them on the floor and move on because they believed them to be dead weight due to inexperience. The other fault was that Forked Tower was *not* by any means a raid on the level of Castrum Lacus Latore or The Dalriada - it was more on the level of an Extreme Trial. This caused Forked Tower to die quite quickly and was resorted to Discord communities for those who wanted to even make an attempt at clearing it.
5) Phantom Jobs
This is probably the last system I'll touch on since this was baked into Occult Crescent in the first place. In general, the Phantom Job System looks great on paper, but there are some issues that plague it from being excellent in execution. When you first start, you start as a Freelancer; the Freelancer gets Levels from every Job it Masters, and for every Job Mastered, you get an additive 2% Damage and Healing Increase. This is incremental, and can stack up to quite a lot of damage as you level Phantom Jobs. What's more, each Phantom Job has their unique kit that can mesh well with certain jobs.
For instance, Warrior and Berserker go exquisitely well together because of the fact that Warrior can use its Invuln, activate Berserker's ability Berserk, and then proceed to use any damage it took to deliver an extreme blow that can hit for millions of damage when done right. Some of the jobs felt satisfying to use; but some? Not so much.
What Phantom Jobs introduced were great as a concept, but there was just *one* thing missing: customization. You see, both Bozja and Eureka allowed players to customize their kits accordingly to what job they were playing through Actions they gained or through items used in the case of Bozja. This gave them different ways to play the game and was what made both Eureka Pyros onward and Bozja better iterations of themselves. Occult Crescent however fails to do this. In case people do not know one of Final Fantasy V's core systems, it was the customization of abilities that actually was at the core of that game, and was what it was praised for. Here in Occult Crescent? It is oddly missing.
Something that is core to the Final Fantasy V game in XIV's iteration of flavoring Final Fantasy V into a theme attraction absolutely fell on its face by not adding this component. Customization would not only award people's time and dedication, but would also make combat a lot easier to handle such as having a Raise on hand while also being able to use offensive abilities from multiple different jobs that fit what job you were playing which, mind, Freelancer levels off jobs you Master - so why couldn't it get customization added?
Irregardless, while it wasn't dead on arrival, it died too quickly for it to be considered "long content" because of not only the restrictions, but also the other issues that plagued Occult Crescent in its first iteration.
Now that we've gone over what made South Horn so bad, let's see what North Horn actually -
North Horn
- Same CE/FATE Grind
- Same Currency Division(now with Chests!)
- Same Pavilion Issue(No Currency Required though!)
- Same Phantom Job Issue(except Freelancer can let you swap mid-combat at Full Mastery)
- Readjusted Forked Tower into Normal and Extreme Modes
...yeah. This didn't change much did it? All they did was slap a new coat of paint on content that should have added more functionality. At best? They barely even learned from their previous mistakes - in fact, I'd almost want to say they didn't learn at all outside of the Forked Tower fiasco everyone yelled quite loudly about throughout all languages.
So I'd like to ask this question directly to those that design Exploration Areas for us in the future: Why do you not improve systems that are perceived as bad and repeat it in the next area when you get feedback from the patch launch?
I'd like an honest answer to that question since Dawntrail has been littered with repeated mistakes in its large-scale content - Cosmic Exploration included. This isn't to preface anything about Evercold though, so please keep that in mind when responding if you've read this far down.
For those who didn't read:
TL;DR Occult Crescent North Horn failed to address the problems with the Exploration Zone as a whole and instead gave us more of the same - and for those wanting to think "We'll expect this same slop in Evercold" you should rethink about that since by the time Evercold comes out they would've had time to process all this feedback into the next Exploration they do.
Continue reading...