Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Dave.]

I maintain that DT was the result of the senior leads having their attention split on two projects (DT and 16) and too much trust being put into the hands of people like Kate and this bozo.

If this is the same guy, the games he worked on prior to coming to SE are pretty telling (visual novels/dating sims.)

I only looked him up because I remember it was mentioned that he also worked on Bozja which is a quest line that I remember featured that “crazy communist lady”. I don’t know if he did, but it tracks with his mockery of commies in the capstone quest for DT. Either he hates communists with a burning passion and made a little straw man for the rebels to beat up or he tried to make an another tsukyomi because she was that popular of a character in storm blood.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

I stand by having enjoyed Dawntrail's base story much more than Heavensward's base story, which I regard as being the worst FF14 MSQ. DT picks up in the second half and the ending did not antagonize me as much as the last act of Endwalker (and therefore, the entirety of the original FF14 storyline) revolving around the uwu birdgirl and Venat. Sphene winds up being a more convincing and likeable antagonist. The problem with Dawntrail's campaign isn't individual bits of "writing" and missed opportunities, but rather the actual moment to moment experience of going through the questing, where you can spend many hours an entire hours long play sessions with nothing exciting happening. I have forgotten most of 3.0's plot but I do remember that you got dungeons and trials about once every 1 to 2ish hours or something like that.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I only looked him up because I remember it was mentioned that he also worked on Bozja which is a quest line that I remember featured that “crazy communist lady”. I don’t know if he did, but it tracks with his mockery of commies in the capstone quest for DT. Either he hates communists with a burning passion and made a little straw man for the rebels to beat up or he tried to make an another tsukyomi because she was that popular of a character in storm blood.

Bozja was largely Yasumi Matsuno's project and there were apparent 'creative differences' that resulted in Bozja's story more or less getting the Poochie treatment and ending in the notes you collect.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

Bozja was largely Yasumi Matsuno's project and there were apparent 'creative differences' that resulted in Bozja's story more or less getting the Poochie treatment and ending in the notes you collect.

I'd pin the main culprit on ShB releasing and then a few weeks later the three did their conference room huddle on what to do next and Yoshida deciding to can the Garlemald expansion and instead leap straight to the finale. We know how many months in advance it takes for FF14 patches to be planned and developed. Bozja would have been in development before the base ShB expansion even released. They were probably planning on going to Lea Monde. But Yoshida decided to capitalize on FF14's ShB momentum and get to the big ending ASAP rather than delay it 4+ years when the momentum might have dissipated by then. So the third installment got canned and they didn't come up with a different field expedition zone replacement for EW.

 

[Well Intentioned]

I'd pin the main culprit on ShB releasing and then a few weeks later the three did their conference room huddle on what to do next and Yoshida deciding to can the Garlemald expansion and instead leap straight to the finale. We know how many months in advance it takes for FF14 patches to be planned and developed. Bozja would have been in development before the base ShB expansion even released. They were probably planning on going to Lea Monde. But Yoshida decided to capitalize on FF14's ShB momentum and get to the big ending ASAP rather than delay it 4+ years when the momentum might have dissipated by then. So the third installment got canned and they didn't come up with a different field expedition zone replacement for EW.

I'd say that probably tracks with why Matsuno threw a shitfit and left the project due to 'health issues' (and then had to be coaxed back for the most recent re-release of FFT by basically giving him carte blanche, again, and axing some of the shit that made its way into the War of the Lions version of FFT.)

I think the hope was that Matsuno was going to stay on board and help with the Garlean expansion that never happened by planting the seeds and handling that, while Yoshida and other members of his team handled the Cosmic Twitter Bird and crap with the Ancients.

It explains the lack of a field ops zone; it likely would've continued with the Bozja/Empire storyline, likely in/near the Garlean Empire or tying up loose ends since a) they don't like tying 'optional' content with main game content (something they seemed to have backed off of) and b) the geographic realities of where the Bozja main players ended up.

As a sidenote, the segment of the EW storyline where you're basically part of a massive military op always felt odd for me given the buildup and then relative let down where you're basically just doing mop up duty, which was necessitated due to the shit Zenos was pulling. It really felt like it was going to be a prelude to something else.

You can see why there was a narrative vaccuum leading up to DT, too. A lot of the seeds that would've hopefully been planted by Matsuno or had him overseeing things were instead thrown helter skelter and, again, we had inexperienced folks taking the reins and the senior devs being split.

I really don't understand why they continually do this, especially since XIV is the 'cash cow' for them right now. There's at least 2 expansions where they crammed way too much shit in and/or scrapped things because it was exceeding the scope of their project (Stormblood and Endwalker.)

You can't say that they really couldn't have milked more Emet-Selch (let's be honest, this is the fucking reason why things got flipped hardcore with EW: we needed more of the breakout character audiences love!) and given themselves room from the Empire story by stretching out the Ancients storyline while continuing it? That approach, using a completely unrelated world that was fully fleshed out, was only the creative highpoint (Shadowbringers) so I guess I understand why they'd shy away from trying that again.

 

[Baron Reginald]

Decided to resub for the month and see what's up and do a few patches worth of MSQ, utterly soul crushingly boring. While I kind of appreciated the attempt at a "Puzzle" section, I managed to figure it out at a glance only to be endlessly annoyed by the fact that even once you saw the gem layout you were entirely unable to input a correct answer until you talk to the NPCs to get the answer anyway, making the entire segment entirely pointless since if the NPC's had the answers you have zero input anyway.
Instantly returned me to skipping every cutscene.

Raid story was dumb, it has some potential to have been interesting but they decided to take the worst approach for it entirely. And of course Brute bomber not being dead, again.
...Again.
They really need to stop even trying to do fakeouts because it's utterly banal at this point.

Lindwurm is also strange, because it looks out of place for the raid series, it feels like a scrapped Pandaemonium boss. Not that I do not like it, probably the only boss I thought was pretty cool in the raid series. Haven't done the savages yet, not sure if I can will myself to do it.

the Garlean expansion that never happened

Also yeah that is entirely why I skipped past EW when it was new for the most part, you blinked and the Garlean war was over, despite all the build up since...well, 1.0 frankly, and all through the background of Stormblood and shadowbringers and sweeping entire plotpoints unter the rug such as reformist parties and outright rebellion laying the groundwork for player's to arrive there and take part. Probably said it before, but EW should of gone through Garlean war and ended with Zodiark on the Moon with the final days stuff being the next expansion (or at least the post expansion arc), was entirely rushed to "finish" the plotpoints, which they have dug back up anyway.

 

[King Of The Kiwis]

Is this a solo mmo or a guild mmo also do kiwifarmers have a guild

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

Is this a solo mmo or a guild mmo

It's a visual novel/JRPG with an optional multiplayer component. All of the content in the game is gated by plot progression. 4 man dungeons. 8 man raid bosses. 24 man raids. Grind zones like Timeless Isle to spend countless hours running around. All of it is gradually unlocked by going through the story. The main story is right now 500+ hours long, half of it being cutscenes, and then a lot of what little quest gameplay there is takes place in solo instances where you literally can't bring other players along like in WoW or GW2. You can also now do all of the story dungeons in the game with NPC party members, so you only need other people for the 8 man raid boss fights, which there is an LFG tool to automatically match you with other people for.

There is little a veteran can meaningfully do with a new player until the new player is some 200+ hours into the story and is half way through Stormblood, at which point they can unlock the first grind zone of Eureka. But Eureka is something like 8+ years old now and most veterans players progressed through it, got the relic weapons they wanted, and left. The next expansion's endgame grind zone of Bozja is also empty too. There are casual treasure map dungeons you can grind with other players once they are a couple hundred hours in, but Square Enix has allowed gil printing and rampant RMT to make that activity worthless past the initial 20 minutes of novelty. The game has a small influx of new players and the current playerbase is top heavy, with most people at the end of the 500+ hour long story and doing expansion #6 stuff at level 100.

Whether or not you like this game boils down to whether or not you like visual novels or ultra story heavy JRPGs like Trails. If you don't then pass. If you want a real Final Fantasy themed MMO then I would recommend playing FF11 Horizon.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

It's a ERP platform with hours and hours and hours of boring solo gameplay before you are caught up on the storyline and can do current patch content with the tranny guild you joined.

 

[King Of Braves]

Finally relented and played the latest MSQ chunk. Thank god they unceremoniously dropped trooncat in the first cutscenes, may she never darken my fucking screen again. The rest is very Krile heavy, like the expansion should have been. Doomtrain was neat too. 7/10. Hopefully they don't fumble the ball again (they will.)

 

[Kane Lives]

Decided to resub for the month and see what's up and do a few patches worth of MSQ, utterly soul crushingly boring. While I kind of appreciated the attempt at a "Puzzle" section, I managed to figure it out at a glance only to be endlessly annoyed by the fact that even once you saw the gem layout you were entirely unable to input a correct answer until you talk to the NPCs to get the answer anyway, making the entire segment entirely pointless since if the NPC's had the answers you have zero input anyway.
Instantly returned me to skipping every cutscene.

Raid story was dumb, it has some potential to have been interesting but they decided to take the worst approach for it entirely. And of course Brute bomber not being dead, again.
...Again.
They really need to stop even trying to do fakeouts because it's utterly banal at this point.

Lindwurm is also strange, because it looks out of place for the raid series, it feels like a scrapped Pandaemonium boss. Not that I do not like it, probably the only boss I thought was pretty cool in the raid series. Haven't done the savages yet, not sure if I can will myself to do it.



Also yeah that is entirely why I skipped past EW when it was new for the most part, you blinked and the Garlean war was over, despite all the build up since...well, 1.0 frankly, and all through the background of Stormblood and shadowbringers and sweeping entire plotpoints unter the rug such as reformist parties and outright rebellion laying the groundwork for player's to arrive there and take part. Probably said it before, but EW should of gone through Garlean war and ended with Zodiark on the Moon with the final days stuff being the next expansion (or at least the post expansion arc), was entirely rushed to "finish" the plotpoints, which they have dug back up anyway.

I'm gonna guess that from this, there's really no point for me to drop money on an expac that I'd likely hate, and there's not much prospect of something I'd actually like in the coming xpac, yes?

 

[Baron Reginald]

I'm gonna guess that from this, there's really no point for me to drop money on an expac that I'd likely hate, and there's not much prospect of something I'd actually like in the coming xpac, yes?

Maybe if you get a key for it from like a reseller or something dirt cheap it like I do for frankly every Xpac for like $10, it might be worth it. The story of DT has made basically every single person I know who played quit (even me even though i poked my head back in for just this month), even the hypercasuals who usually enjoyed the story and the few who have stayed with it are openly on hopium that the next xpac will fix it, but they have started skipping every cutscene despite never skipping a cutscene ever. The regions are uninspired and frankly, absolutely not memorable at all and I couldn't tell you any of their names, and even if you gave me their names outside of the main cities i couldn't tell you which name was which area. The only good thing about DT is some of the dungeons and trials are actually pretty good. It's too late to really enjoy the savages outside the new final one, but the first tier of savages was actually fun.

Basically, unless you are hurting for content to do, it isn't worth much else outside a stepping stone for maybe just going into the next xpac sometime next year (because surprise, there's going to be an even longer content drought than the one from EW to DT lasting up to nearly a whole year of nothing).

 

[Not your Buddy Holly]

(because surprise, there's going to be an even longer content drought than the one from EW to DT lasting up to nearly a whole year of nothing).

Inhales copium There's still the Blue Mage update, Beastmaster being released and the second half of Occult Cresent Inhales copium

But yeah, I'm on my second vacation for this expac. Meanwhile I only took one from my entirety of A Realm Reborn to Endwalker, and the reason why was that I was literally done gearing everything up and had nothing to do till Dawntrail's release.

 

[SnowBall]

You can't say that they really couldn't have milked more Emet-Selch (let's be honest, this is the fucking reason why things got flipped hardcore with EW: we needed more of the breakout character audiences

To be fair Bozja is side content and Yoshi P got most likely scared away from adding too much stuff from side content and requiring to complete them to advance the msq after the community threw a huge shitfit over Crystal Tower being made mandatory for ShB in an update (I think it was 5.3 that made it mandatory.)

I also think people are putting way too much assumptions over how Matsuno would have worked on the msq.

We were also told in an interview that Emet and the rest of the ancients stuff in EW was already planned out from the start and had nothing to do with his popularity. The plot with them would have probably stayed the same regardless of whether or not we got a garlemald expansion. Too many plot points about the ancients in EW were laid down in 5.0-5.3 in ShB to feel like they were shoved in for fanservice. Also they planned condensing expansions pretty early into 5.0, if there was a plan it probably never made it past a story board. Not saying garlemald didn't get shafted though.

Besides ancients got treated poorly too- only one major msq zone, rushed as fuck, and we never visit it again in the main msq when we leave. Also the characters themselves are dropped from the main msq in 6.x outside of the alliance raids name dropping them. If we got two expansions we'd probably get even more ancient world zones (Amaurot would have most likely be an end game hub zone.) At least with Garlemald we visit it twice in 6.0 and a few times in the 6.x patches. If they were planning the Zero stuff as a separate trial series instead of being baked in the msq that's another thing most likely not related to the EW ancients.

Also this fandom in general loves to make up scenarios in their heads with how the story is written.
(I'm stupidly drunk as fuck so apologize for the autism ramblings that I'll probably forget I made later.)

 

[Well Intentioned]

To be fair Bozja is side content and Yoshi P got most likely scared away from adding too much stuff from side content

I said as much, but it is something they seem to be walking back off of now, which is encouraging. I'd rather there be more interconnectedness.

I also think people are putting way too much assumptions over how Matsuno would have worked on the msq.

Honestly, that was wild speculation on my behalf. He was ostensibly brought in to work on just Bozja, but the fact that the actual story was abruptly cut off makes me wonder what the next steps were.

We were also told in an interview that Emet and the rest of the ancients stuff in EW was already planned out from the start and had nothing to do with his popularity. The plot with them would have probably stayed the same regardless of whether or not we got a garlemald expansion. Too many plot points about the ancients in EW were laid down in 5.0-5.3 in ShB to feel like they were shoved in for fanservice.

We also had interviews where they were talking about how they scrapped story elements due to being 'burnt out' on Empire stuff.

And I honestly, I dunno about the dev cycles at the time, but having Emet-Selch's last moment be in Shadowbringers has a lot more oomph narratively-speaking and having him show up again in EW feels like a victory lap.

 

[SnowBall]

I mean I can understand being burnt out on Garlemald. We had the entirety of 1.0 with them, 2.0 with them, they were awkwardly shoved in base HW (imo.) Stormblood was two expansions worth of Garlemald getting its ass kicked crammed into one (and focusing on both Doma and Ala Mhigo at the same time made SB extremely repetitive.) ShB had Bozja, EW had a zone, etc. That’s basically a decade of the same villains being used over and over and honestly mowing down Garleans stopped being interesting when Stormblood ended.

 

[00R-Gundam]

Wouldnt surprise me if next expansion involves time travel to the future or the past, because at this point whats left in the setting that we would actually give a fuck about?

 

[King Of Braves]

Wouldnt surprise me if next expansion involves time travel to the future or the past, because at this point whats left in the setting that we would actually give a fuck about?

Probably either further exploring the Ninth to resolve the lightning aether imbalance like we did for the First with Eden, or exploring whichever reflection was lost to ice that the Milala came from. Assuming reflection shenanigans anyways instead of going to Mericydia or something.

 

[Lou's Sentient Backfat]

whichever reflection was lost to ice that the Milala came from.

They came from the Source. They fled during the Age of Eternal Frost. They're originally from the south sea isles, aka Aloalo

 

[Shieldman]

Has there been any talk of dropping MSQ requirements towards the next expansion?

I doubt I'll return anytime soon but if I do I dread the prospect of dragging myself through what remains of DT (stopped around the .2 patch)