Final Fantasy 14 producer and director Naoki ‘Yoshi-P’ Yoshida has opened up about the struggle of designing content for both casual and hardcore players, admitting the recent Forked Tower: Blood raid was a “misstep” that wasn’t intended to be as difficult as it originally was.
“I do feel that Forked Tower: Blood was a misstep in development,” Yoshida told RPG Site. “It wasn’t meant to be hardcore content, so to speak. The intention was that it might be more difficult at first, but over time more players might be willing to take on the challenge; yet, in the end we made it too difficult for players to even get into the raid in the first place.”
As Yoshida alluded to here, the main issue with the Occult Crescent’s 48-player raid wasn’t necessarily its difficulty level, but how inaccessible it was. Yoshida shared last week that, at the time, it had only been cleared 400 times in 23 days, and that seemed largely due to the fact that you couldn’t queue into it from the Duty Finder, meaning you had to load into an instance and hope to find enough people around to do the encounter when it became available.
Square has since implemented a number of changes to make the raid easier and less time-consuming to access, and now Yoshida has elaborated a little on what it’s like being one of the people pulling the strings in an online game being played by millions of people with wildly different expectations. It turns out it’s pretty hard.
“We are trying to work within a specific timescale, and trying to satisfy both types of players,” Yoshida said, referring to casual and hardcore playstyles. “At the same time, even if we were to double our number of developers, I don’t think we’d necessarily be able to double our output while trying to maintain the same level of quality.”
Square has said it plans to drop Final Fantasy 14’s 7.3 update sometime in early August, and that patch will include a new Deep Dungeon called Pilgrim’s Traverse, which Yoshida said “will appeal to a more casual playstyle” even though there’s “an additional extra hard boss” aimed toward “more hardcore players who might find” the dungeon “lacking in the difficulty department.
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