I like Final Fantasy 14 a lot, but like many non-raiders, I need a little more challenge. As I mentioned in my retrospective earlier this year, the game suffers from a kind of polarized difficulty. Unorganized raid content is a little too easy, and organized raid content is reasonably difficult, but when it comes to challenge, that's really all there is.

Fortunately, the game's director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi P.) seems to recognize this, according to an interview with Famitsu translated by Automaton. In an interview with Famitsu, Yoshida said, "During the development process of FFXIV, we have tried to make the game more comfortable and stress-free for players, but looking back over the past 10 years, we may have "overdone it" a bit."

He further compares "Final Fantasy 14" to a platformer without the pitfalls. Stress can cause frustration. But stress is also necessary for the excitement of wanting to return to FF14. However, we don't want to "simply increase the difficulty of the game," so it will be a slow and steady process.

The endgame content in Final Fantasy 14 can be divided into two main categories: organized group content (mostly raids) and solo content.

Endwalker is a great expansion for organized group content, with a very solid set of raid fights, the well-received Extreme, and Ultimates-20, which requires top-of-the-line equipment and can take months to learn and defeat. Two whole boss gauntlets were added. Solo content is another story.

As far as endwalkers go, everything that doesn't require teaming up is fun but easy the first couple of times and consequently gets boring after repeated playthroughs, which is a problem since grinding is the key to the MMO stew. Variant dungeons were an exception to this rule, but had poor replayability for an entirely different reason.

I think this ultimately comes down to the design assumption that "casual" and "solo" players want the same thing, which is thankfully becoming less and less desirable. The "casual" player and the "solo" player want the same thing: there's nothing wrong with wanting to relax and unwind in an MMO, but some solo players simply don't have the time for organized raids.

I started playing around the time of Shadowbringer, so I can't speak to whether FF14 has gotten easier during my 10-year tenure. However, I do remember that the field exploration zone "Boja" filled this gap nicely. If they were really ambitious, there were also duels with a 1vs1 raid-like difficulty against a randomly selected boss enemy. Other players could cheer from the sidelines; Bozja certainly had its own problems, but I definitely felt its absence in this expansion. [Fortunately, Yoshida has already confirmed the return of the field exploration zone, and I can't help but hope that this is a harbinger of a healthy return of stress to one of my favorite games.