Following the recent interview with FFXIV’s lead combat designer Masaki Nakagawa - or more famously known as Mr Ozma - there have been quite a few creators from the community sharing their thoughts about the so-called midcore content in the game.
You can read the article by PCGamer here:
When I started playing in 2016 I was a very casual player, mostly playing alone and for the story. I had experience with other MMOrpgs, but FFXIV’s battle system was completely new to me, so different from single-player titles of the franchise that let’s just say I didn’t get on with it very well. Once I got yelled at in a dungeon for not doing anything when no one needed healing, because my very casual sprout self didn’t know that she was supposed to do damage as well. Fast forward to today and I’m a mentor with multiple difficult content clears behind my back like Savage and Ultimate raids and completed challenges as a healer, which were designed for DPS classes.
So what content is midcore for me and what content I think is missing?
Midcore depends on if you want to define it by the difficulty of the content or by the time and effort one has to put in to complete that content.
If we go by difficulty, for me midcore content is somewhere between the normal difficulty dungeons, trials, raids and the extreme trials or first few savage raids of a tier. Mr Ozma puts this difficulty somewhere between extreme trials and the savage raids, which might be true for Japanese players who are more organised, but definitely from what I’ve seen playing on the European and North American Data Centers, the jump from dungeons to extreme trials is too big for a lot of people. Luckily Dawntrail seems to be solving this issue by introducing more difficult dungeons and trials, where you might wipe a couple of times on your first run to clear it. I think this was a much needed change, and will help people get ready for the more difficult content.
A fellow mentor has similar opinion about the difficulty part:
But let’s talk about midcore from a playstyle point of view. Most hardcore content like savage and ultimate raids are done via pre-formed statics and people will prog the fights 3 or more days a week, often aiming for clearing on week one, so then they just have to come back every week to re-clear for the rewards. These fights are also done by recruiting players via the Party Finder, but it will be a hit-or-miss how skilled players you get, how patient they will be, and you might be wasting hours wiping or waiting for the party to fill.
If you have a full-time job, family or other interests then you don’t have time for this. So what content can you do, if you have the skills for the more challenging fights, but you can only spend one afternoon playing? How can you make that time worthwhile yet fun and challenging for yourself?
The content I miss the most:
Stormblood and Shadowbringers had content aimed at such an audience called Field Operations, with an endgame area which had its own progression system, storyline, and lots of open-world engagements to do with various difficulties. Updates to these areas were scheduled in with the regular patches and the relic weapon was also tied into these, giving you an end goal to work towards.
This was Eureka in Stormblood and Bozja in Shadowbringers, but Endwalker was lacking such content and the relic weapon was a simple grind where you could collect the necessary materials by doing your daily roulettes. I liked the aesthetics of Eureka better, but the combat style of Bozja was fitting for more people, and clearly they have implemented feedback from players after Eureka. Why Endwalker didn’t have such content, we don’t know, but here are my thoughts on why such content is important:
Since then we know that we will be getting similar content in Dawntrail, but there is still a problem. Dawntrail was released in July, we received the first big patch with new content in November and there’s still a while to go until the next one. Yet we didn’t get the first stage of this Field Operations content, nor did we get to start on our relic weapons.
We had the first tier of savage raids, an ultimate and the chaotic alliance raid which is a new type of content aimed at midcore difficulty (according to Mr Ozma’s understanding of midcore, so somewhere between extreme trials and the first couple encounters of the savage raid tier. But all of this content requires either a static or hoping for a good group in party finder. So currently there is nothing to do for those people, who have limited time for playing but would like to work towards a goal which will take them through the expansion and make it worthwhile to keep being subscribed.
And if you approach it from content difficulty and not time spent in the game, then there is nothing for the casual players to do. We were promised a Cosmic Exploration content, which will involve some crafting and gathering, just like Island Sanctuary did in Endwalker and half a year after the release of the expansion we still didn’t get to see it. All these type of endgame content should start shortly after finishing the MSQ, so probably in the x.1 patch when the first savage raids come out, to make sure that every player has something to do and feels like their money is well spent on the subscription. I’m not the only one who thinks this way, Mr Happy who is a raider and long-time content creator also mentions this in his discussion about midcore content:
I don’t like to react to other creator’s videos, as I find that lazy and clickbait content, but I like to highlight other creators and share their thoughts as well, it’s always good to look at a topic from different points of view, so let me link another video here, from my hero Larry, who is back to being a full-time content creator and shares his thoughts about what a casual player is:
How does endgame content look like in the game you are playing? Would love to here the experience of our EVE community, maybe I should make that the next podcast episode?
Anyway, thank you for bearing with my long ramblings which I totally didn't write in one sitting after getting home from work, without any draft and just the title to go by...
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