Final Fantasy 14's developers have explained the rationale behind explaining the rationale behind a Raid boss being too strong.
Yes, you read that correctly. Earlier this week, Final Fantasy 14 director Naoki Yoshida penned a letter to the game's community, acknowledging that the health for a new Savage-tier Raid boss was a little higher than intended due to the development team playtesting it for longer than usual.
Today, Yoshida has delved into the rationale behind the original explanation. Writing on the Lodestone, Yoshida revealed he'd be seeing a lot of chatter surrounding not only the changes to the Raid boss's health, but also the original explanation from the dev team as to why it was incorrect.
Yoshida's post apologizes (yet again) for the confusion, and reveals that having the health of the boss set too high actually excluded certain Jobs from the new Raid itself. Additionally, Yoshida acknowledges that this type of correction is unprecedented for Final Fantasy 14 in general.
The post then goes on to explain that the dev team regard Final Fantasy 14's top players as being better at their own game than them. Because of this, Yoshida says, boss values are actually increased slightly based off what the development team playtests, so as to not rob high-level players of the satisfaction of beating a difficult foe.
Finally, it turns out Square Enix saw players picking Jobs with higher damage output for the Raid boss, and so felt more inclined to adjust the Raid itself, rather than rebalance Jobs. Yoshida concludes by writing that the rebalance was never considered a "nerf" for the Raid boss, but rather a readjustment to where everything ought to be in the first place.
The Final Fantasy 14 director has, as ever, gone above and beyond to explain everything to players in a succinct manner. What started off as a blissful source of memes for players actually turned out to be quite the headache for the development team, in the end.
This is the same Raid where fans discovered a glowing red eye in the background, but no one's been able to decipher what it means.
