Final Fantasy XVI (PC/PS5) - June 22, 2023

[Tymon]

With how well FF14 is doing, I don't see a MMO coming anytime soon

It's going to depend on how well XIV continues to sell. Endwalker at launch was the zenith of XIV's popularity by a very wide margin, but most people including myself believe that they haven't done a great job keeping people engaged since then.

It's really hard to sell a MMORPG on the concept of playing through the (admittedly absolutely incredible) RPG story campaign then actually not playing the MMO part of it.

Yoshi-P said last year they intend to keep XIV in active development as the focal MMO for at least another 5 years if not more. But if Dawntrail tanks then I suspect that might not be the case.

[Zealot]

I came back to FFXIV when Endwalker was announced, eventually caught up to current, and quit playing again pretty much immediately after I started having to wait for new content. No plans to come back for 7.0, it's just going to be more of the same, ultimately.

[arus2001]

Much as it seems to be en vogue to bemoan XIV's lack of content, from my perspective, it's pretty much been the same since ARR. There's certainly the vocal minority out there that thinks leaning more into grinds, raids, and other traditional content is The Way(tm), but that's just perpetuating the genre stagnation and no amount of good story telling can compensate for mechanical ennui. The latter just took a bit longer to hit the hardcores/addicts/diehards or whatever you want to call them. Especially when the game isn't meant to be no-lifed.

Just lurking here and there, some think Eureka/Bozja is the solution, but I'm more inclined to call this content bad despite its deceptively casual nature. Sure, you can drop in and out whenever, but you've still got elements of time gating, progress loss, and soft group reliance that makes the instances that aren't booming a chore. Each has their own nuances of cumulative bad decisions, too. At best, these are a loose foundation for more of an open world style with the rough edges sanded off, but I'd also make a conscious effort to include the DoH/DoL side of the game to the equation, too. I won't really dig much deeper since this isn't the place and I'm sure some are chomping at the bit to "NUH-UH!" me already.

That said, this doesn't really address the creative side of the community and those who want a housing system that isn't retarded, a glamour system that makes sense and isn't so restrictive, better ways to facilitate and encourage RP beyond shouting/PF (and being "banished" to a particular DC/server), and in general, events better suited for them. These people are a part of MMOs no matter how much the min/maxers don't want them to be, and I'm inclined to say they've been an underserved subset of the community since MMOs were even a thing. More hardcore content does them no good, yet leeching their subs to fuel that insatiable black hole doesn't really feel fair, either.

When it comes to current relics, I think even SE realized what they've done before wasn't that great and just forcing the selective spamming of dead content doesn't really revitalize it the way some think it does, either. The shift to tomes at least offers a bit more freedom to do what you want, even if an argument could be made that maybe it should cost more. Still, the idea of relics or prestige gear also feels like one of those archaic MMO ideas that sounded cool on paper, but generally floundered when put to practice between player behavior and what MMOs tend to offer overall.

I do expect some growing pains for XIV, and stuff like the Trust system they started with Shadowbringers feels like them trying to get ahead of that. Starting up a fresh MSQ risks being a miss when the near decade of buildup doesn't really apply anymore. The WoW exodus between content drought and Blizzard being a shit company has come and gone even if the latter is still a thing, and it's not like there's really any other MMO on the lips of players because they all think the The Way(tm) is the path to success and yet it time and again shows it isn't with WoW and FF perhaps persisting on brand recognition and sunken cost more than being innovative and inclusive. The whole idea of the game beginning at endgame and endgame just being a big excel spreadsheet really isn't going to last, or more aptly thrive, no matter how desperately clung to or pined for.

[Kirin]

Is there even a large enough non-Asia market to support a console based MMO nowadays for longer than 2-3 years? I cant imagine they would make it PC baseline, and even with the FF brand behind it that is not nearly as big a guarantee now as it was even 5 years ago for revenue. Awful lot to sink upfront when your other launch option (PS5 install base as a baseline) isnt too hot, which was one of the primary problems with FFXVI's figures.

NA has seemed to moved back to the yearly installment titles (NFL, NBA, CoD), Games as a Service is starting to taper off, MOBA's (as an extension of E-Sports) can't seem to find a thriving business model for sustainability, and AAA development on large is going to face a reckoning much sooner than later.

But SE has shown they will do SE things. So who knows.

[arus2001]

The very nature of more games to play presents a natural strain on the service idea. Think subscription fatigue for streaming services, just for video games. And while we can pirate movies or television shows, it's not so easy for multiplayer things. For better or worse, this is why you need strong casual content. And as an extension of that take, the reality you can't have a good multi-player game without it being a good solo game first. Folks aren't going to stick around for games that don't respect their time when fresh experiences are right around the corner.

[Andalusian girls]

don't disagree with a lot of what's been said, but with the caveat XIV is gonna be more than fine for the foreseeable future. MMOs tend to see boom bust cycles built around expansions, and XIV had never been more popular or profitable than immediately after Endwalker in late 2021. if Dawntrail maintains the quality of what's come before imagine it'll be more of the same. if SE devoted more resources to regular updates and content launch during the expansion off years they might/would probably achieve more linear growth, but they seemingly have no interest in that, because, they are SE.

regardless, XIV will almost definitely wind up their most profitable game ever by the time it winds down + WoW remains hugely profitable for Blizzard after 19 years and a subscriber base cut in half from its prior highs. i mean XIV was such a cash machine even in its less popular earlier state they gave Yoshida the keys to the kingdom in being the producer of XVI. i'd say 5 years is a reasonable estimate for continued support and profitability, low end even. MMO profit margin is disgusting.

[Zealot]

I didn't think there was a lack of content, I thought there was no way to get the content I wanted to do done.

[Tymon]

I completely disagree with the angle that content has always been this way, albeit I do understand the thought process.

ARR had terrible replayability, that's undeniable. What was there was very fun, but it was also raw and clearly unfinished at the time. I did enjoy it because it was 10 years ago and I was a cashier with tons of time on my hands lol

HW, didn't play it during launch. Idk

SB, probably the best expansion ever as far as post-story content. Eureka was hundreds of hours, Omega was amazing, Ivalice raid was amazing. Just great all around.

ShB was an exercise in masterpiece story wise, Bozja was fantastic albeit not as great as Eureka, Eden was fantastic, Nier raid was the best yet.

Endwalker continued the story masterpiece and capped it off perfectly, but everything else sucked ass. Pandemonium is terrible, the raid is terrible, there's nothing else to do. Just a really bad execution all around.

Pretty much all of the feedback including from very influential content creators have echoed this to the team and told them everything above, so I do believe they'll do better in Dawntrail. If they don't, well, the bells are tolling.

As it stands, I'll buy and play MSQ of every xpac they put out. They have earned my money and time for that much. But I can't see myself getting invested in endgame again unless it really pulls me in.

[arus2001]

In terms of bleeding edge, Savage stuff can be rough if you're more an off-peak hours player and can't land yourself a static, which is probably harder if you favor DPS too. That isn't to imply the content itself is unbearably hard, but if you do find yourself with people who can't figure shit out, then wipes and abandons can happen. And since it's an MMO, you better do that shit weekly since there's no backlog of drop claims.

Some older content can't be solo powered through with unsync due to mechanics, at least if you're not a WAR or PLD maybe. Landing the Bozja and Eureka raids can also be rough since they're conditional to activity in the given zones. Chasing a mount or minion in a specific dungeon can be a slog just due to shitty drop rates, too. So while those may not be difficult, they can be demoralizing in their own way if you're 0/stupidnumber. The amount of "Do X or DIE!" in a lot of unsynced solo/low-man stuff is arguably a disservice to the aged content, too. So while this may technically lead to learning the fights better, there's still the whole "mouths to feed" element once you start adding more bodies. And I think most of us played XI enough to know how that usually panned out.

Overall, I do think XIV could be a deeper, more flexible game that isn't so much about riding GCDs on mathematically formulated rotations, but as I inferred in my last post, that's pretty much been ARR on. To me, the "RPG" in MMOs has never really existed due to some level of conformity eventually taking hold, be it mechanical or social. And similar to how lootbox/gacha can program players, I think the same has happened here in its own ways when it comes to adhering to tradition or just believing more, more, more is the ticket.

[Zealot]

I don't think I'm going to pick up another MMO period unless I start out with a good 3 or 4 friends whom I know will be playing and don't plan to fuck off with their own statics and leave me kicking rocks. Pick up parties for the hardest content is not for me, and I get no enjoyment from running the same content I already have endlessly to get cosmetic gear.

XIV's story is phenomenal but I ain't gonna sit around paying a subscription fee while I wait months at a time for the next chapter to drop and then beat it in a day.

[Ayn]

I can empathize with that. I did enjoy the time I had with friends (like Zealot), but my schedule's so wonky and feeling the need to rush through things rather than my own pace kinda kills it for me.

[Rulke]

I know this is the FFFXVI thread, but since this page is all FXIV stuff :3 I personally feel that the finale with Endwalker is just too good. I am still playing and will cont. into 7.0 but I highly doubt anything is going to get me to the same interest level as what we've been given so far. It'll be something "to do" but I don't see anyone but the big fans of the game (like me I guess) really staying on board FFXIV much longer.

[Tymon]

The finale of Shadowbringers leading up to and through the entirety of 6.0 was the greatest gaming story experience ever for me. It's really unfortunate that 6.1+ has been a letdown. The peak was truly unreal.

[Ayn]

Geez, y'all are making me want to resub to finish Shadowbringers. I'd just started.

[Tyrath]

I was still stuck on shitty (pre?) Heavensward content

[Zealot]

Shadowbringers through the conclusion of 6.0 is 100% worth the time investment.

[Prothescar]

6.0 was v good, the first two trials were some of the best ever out into the game.

Everything after 6.0 was substandard, especially the storytelling* which has always been XIV's forte. Outside of that, there is no content with any staying power, no long term reason to keep playing. You could finish every patch in Endwalker within 2-3 weeks of it coming out. If you aren't a savage/ultimate raider, make that 1-3 days. Even ultimate should only take a dedicated group around a month to complete. This is exacerbated by the fact that they extended the patch cycle out to 4 months.

Eureka and Bozja are still popping off to this day with communities that still organize runs for their big alliance dungeons. Even if relics weren't tied to them, the absence of anything to fill that void has been awful for player retention. Variant/Criterion are largely regarded to be unrewarding, do it once then never again poorly executed wastes of both developer and player time. There's plenty of ways they could have made them last longer, like putting Tomestone gear upgrade items in there as weekly rewards or some unique set of raid tier ilvl gear to give a third set to choose from. Instead we got what we got.

There's visibly less people playing the game right now than in almost any other period of XIV's history, and that's coming off of the largest swell of activity that XIV, and really ANY SE title, has seen and likely ever will see.

*

Spoiler: show

It's slow, it's tedious. There's little to nothing interesting happening. They've taken two years to get us into the void, and the stuff happening there is nothing short of meh. Zero is not a strong enough character to crutch up the entire narrative on. Golbez was a shit tier Saturday morning cartoon villain until the last patch. 6.5 has to be incredible to redeem this shit.

Going into 7.0, all of the 6.1-6.45 story can likely be safely skipped and ignored with little to no consequence. We'll see how they tie in 6.5 to 7.0, but my suspicion is that they'll be completely separate.

That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. We don't need another 10 year odyssey that ends in us killing a godlike being or three. But at least make each contained story interesting.

Don't even get me started on Pandemonium and the alliance raid stories. Pandemonium was utter drivel and dogshit until the last couple of cutscenes. We literally went back to the height of Ancient civilization, into the depths of their top secret life form creation testing facility, and all we got was some half baked bullshit story about a guard with daddy issues. Lahabrea's back story doesn't become a factor until toward the end, and quite frankly the resolution to that was annoying and largely unsatisfying.

As for the twelve, it's treated with even less reverence. I once again expect the final cut scenes to drop some lore bombs, but up until now it has been a pointless waste of time to try to include any story at all. All of the twelves' personalities have been portrayed via battle rather than storytelling. The overarching plot itself doesn't even need to exist as it has been on the same cliffhanger since 6.1. We don't get any of the supplemental post-main-quest storytelling like we did for the Ivalice or Nier lines that had us going back into the zones to discover lore with a bunch of NPCs and little miniquests. It's a farce.

I can only hope that the setbacks presented by splitting the dev resources between xiv and xvi as well as committing to the graphics overhaul will be resolved some time in the 7.0 patch cycle and we will return to stories worth reading.

[Anoat]

I think it’s pretty clear that Yoshi P was very hands on to the conclusion of 6.0 and then almost immediately went all in on XVI, 6.1 to present has felt half hearted and empty for many reasons others have mentioned. I don’t think things will be different in 6.5, but I fully expect a return to form with 7.0

[Vaspinne]

6.0 was v good, the first two trials were some of the best ever out into the game.

Everything after 6.0 was substandard, especially the storytelling* which has always been XIV's forte. Outside of that, there is no content with any staying power, no long term reason to keep playing. You could finish every patch in Endwalker within 2-3 weeks of it coming out. If you aren't a savage/ultimate raider, make that 1-3 days. Even ultimate should only take a dedicated group around a month to complete. This is exacerbated by the fact that they extended the patch cycle out to 4 months.

Eureka and Bozja are still popping off to this day with communities that still organize runs for their big alliance dungeons. Even if relics weren't tied to them, the absence of anything to fill that void has been awful for player retention. Variant/Criterion are largely regarded to be unrewarding, do it once then never again poorly executed wastes of both developer and player time. There's plenty of ways they could have made them last longer, like putting Tomestone gear upgrade items in there as weekly rewards or some unique set of raid tier ilvl gear to give a third set to choose from. Instead we got what we got.

There's visibly less people playing the game right now than in almost any other period of XIV's history, and that's coming off of the largest swell of activity that XIV, and really ANY SE title, has seen and likely ever will see.

*

Spoiler: show

It's slow, it's tedious. There's little to nothing interesting happening. They've taken two years to get us into the void, and the stuff happening there is nothing short of meh. Zero is not a strong enough character to crutch up the entire narrative on. Golbez was a shit tier Saturday morning cartoon villain until the last patch. 6.5 has to be incredible to redeem this shit.

Going into 7.0, all of the 6.1-6.45 story can likely be safely skipped and ignored with little to no consequence. We'll see how they tie in 6.5 to 7.0, but my suspicion is that they'll be completely separate.

That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. We don't need another 10 year odyssey that ends in us killing a godlike being or three. But at least make each contained story interesting.

Don't even get me started on Pandemonium and the alliance raid stories. Pandemonium was utter drivel and dogshit until the last couple of cutscenes. We literally went back to the height of Ancient civilization, into the depths of their top secret life form creation testing facility, and all we got was some half baked bullshit story about a guard with daddy issues. Lahabrea's back story doesn't become a factor until toward the end, and quite frankly the resolution to that was annoying and largely unsatisfying.

As for the twelve, it's treated with even less reverence. I once again expect the final cut scenes to drop some lore bombs, but up until now it has been a pointless waste of time to try to include any story at all. All of the twelves' personalities have been portrayed via battle rather than storytelling. The overarching plot itself doesn't even need to exist as it has been on the same cliffhanger since 6.1. We don't get any of the supplemental post-main-quest storytelling like we did for the Ivalice or Nier lines that had us going back into the zones to discover lore with a bunch of NPCs and little miniquests. It's a farce.

I can only hope that the setbacks presented by splitting the dev resources between xiv and xvi as well as committing to the graphics overhaul will be resolved some time in the 7.0 patch cycle and we will return to stories worth reading.

This is incredibly accurate. 6.0 was a great finish to the overarching story they managed to build up until that point. And yeah, it's kind of hard to go from "THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE IS GOING TO END AND YOU HAVE TO SAVE IT" to whatever the fuck we got in 6.1->now. Content wise, 6.1 to now (and presumably 6.5 will be too) has been incredibly fucking boring

[Prothescar]

And I will say I don't think 6.0 was perfect and I maintain that Shadowbringers was much stronger in almost every way when it came to the writing. But 6.0 was still up to the XIV standard, which for MMOs is pretty much peerless.