Final Fantasy 14's battle designer admits they went a little overboard on streamlining fights, especially for melee: 'Our policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far'

pcgamer.com:

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