Summary
- Final Fantasy 14 lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa has admitted that the streamlining of Endwalker’s bosses was “taken too far”.
- Nakagawa admits that interesting mechanics were thought up for bosses, but were vetoed to reduce potential frustration with downtime from melee players.
- Thankfully, Nakagawa says a shift in attitude has occurred with Dawntrail, and the team now doesn’t want content to “lose its diversity”.
Final Fantasy 14’s Dawntrail expansion had plenty of issues, but the complexity and difficulty of dungeons and raids was not one of them. After a few years of fairly underwhelming boss fights throughout Endwalker, Yoshi-P and his team came back swinging in Dawntrail, so much so that some people even complained about bosses being too difficult this time around.
In fact, a few developers at Square Enix have been looking back at Endwalker and have admitted that the combat just wasn’t quite right. Yoshi-P himself said before the launch of Dawntrail that he regretted making the game less stressful, and now lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa has admitted the streamlining of Endwalker’s bosses was “taken too far”.
Final Fantasy 14: Endwalker Bosses Were Too Simple Due To Melee Players
In an interview with PC Gamer, Nakagawa explains that a lot of the reasons why boss fights in Endwalker were so lackluster were due to a policy of trying not to frustrate melee DPS players with downtime. This is probably the reason why so many boss fights in the MSQ lack positionals, or have any kind of mechanics that stop you from dealing damage.
“Prior to [Dawntrail], our policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far,” says Nakagawa. “And in some cases, even the hurdles and frustrations that existed to make the gameplay more engaging were eliminated, which made them less fun.”
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Nakagawa even says that interesting ideas for mechanics were vetoed simply to avoid long periods of downtime for melee players, and were “easily eliminated” due to the environment in which Endwalker was developed.
Thankfully, those days are now behind Nakagawa and the team, and Dawntrail has benefited from that change in mindset. The latest MSQ dungeon alone has a mechanic that makes you carefully navigate through a maze of blood, and run around a ring-shaped arena from rapidly approaching attacks, and they’re some of the most interesting mechanics in the game to date.
Nakagawa himself even points to the absurd mechanics in the Alexander raid series from Heavensward, claiming that “our content would lose its diversity and all bosses would end up following the same patterns” if the team were to never experiment with mechanics like turning into a gorilla and batting bombs away. Long may it continue, that’s what I say.
