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Anyone who endured Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker as a melee main will know the pain of that expansion's raids and bosses—gigantic hitboxes, no positionals to hit, and virtually zero downtime to strategise around.
Those things sound like a dream, sure, but in practice they kneecapped any semblance of challenge that makes those classes so fun to play. Every boss was now just a giant, arena-sized punching bag with varying mechanics to learn. At least, that's how it felt, anyway. Those things were already creeping in during Stormblood and Shadowbringers, but it was Endwalker where the oversimplification really came to a head.
The often easy and homogenised battle design has proven to be one of the 2021 expansion's biggest criticisms, something which lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa and his team has been making up for in spades in Dawntrail. After all, even he admits they went a touch far with streamlining fights.
"Prior to [Dawntrail], our policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far," Nakagawa told PC Gamer in a recent interview. "And in some cases, even the hurdles and frustrations that existed to make the gameplay more engaging were eliminated, which made them less fun."
Discussing Endwalker specifically, Nakagawa confesses the team "vetoed some interesting ideas for mechanics so melee players wouldn't be frustrated by periods of downtime where they can't attack the boss; we removed them regardless of how interesting the mechanic could be." Like I said before, it did really feel like melee DPS jobs bore the brunt of Endwalker's underwhelming difficulty the most, though healers aren't far behind. "In hindsight, we should've weighed the interesting nature of an idea versus the frustration of being unable to attack, but our policies had formed an environment where such ideas were easily eliminated," Nakagawa said.
The team's mindset has since shifted to "placing greater emphasis on enjoyability," with Nakagawa calling it "a bold decision for us with a lot of unknown factors." It's been paying off so far, though: Dawntrail's battle design has been far better received than its predecessor, with story dungeons nailing the challenge even if there are still arguments over whether its savage and ultimate raids are still a touch easy.
But even with pure difficulty set aside, Square Enix has been doing more interesting things. There's plenty of downtime across its first four raids—players get knocked into the air and rendered unable to attack, melees have to zip far away from bosses to drop AOE puddles, and mechanics that require lots of movement have proven great practice for all my slidecasting when I play White Mage.
Interestingly, Nakagawa brings up the Alexander raids from Heavensward. As he points out, they're full of niche and bespoke mechanics that you don't see anywhere else across the game, ones that often rip you out of your rotation to do things like bat bombs away as a giant gorilla or hopping on a mount. "If we continue to veto ideas like those out of concern for frustrations, like losing DPS when turning into a gorilla, our content would lose its diversity and all bosses would end up following the same patterns," Nakagawa said. "That said, we also don't believe that everything needs to be unique; after all, some battles should remain orthodox while others can be tremendously innovative, and it was this ideology which led to the revision of our content design policies."
I can definitely understand Nakagawa's desire to perfectly balance regular rotation-based fights with some slightly whackier mechanics. Hell, I know melee DPS who won't even use Limit Break because it messes with their rotation. Finding a nice middle ground where a little critical thinking is needed while still largely being able to pump your rotation out effectively is something I think will take beyond Dawntrail to figure out, but great steps are already being taken.
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