If you found yourself a touch underwhelmed by Endwalker's bosses in Final Fantasy 14, the game's battle designer has conceded that the team's determination to remove any downtime was what led to the expansion's not-so-fun boss fights.
In an interview with PC Gamer, Final Fantasy 14 lead battle designer Masaki Nakagawa discussed the approach to boss design in 2021's Endwalker expansion, explaining that, at the time, the team's "policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far," adding that "in some cases, even the hurdles and frustrations that existed to make the gameplay more engaging were eliminated, which made them less fun."
Nakagawa notes that this had a particular impact on Endwalker specifically, noting that 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."
In the end, while they achieved their goal of reducing the downtime, the trade-off was that fights were largely too easy, if not outright boring. "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 explains.
As an example, he mentions Heavensward's Alexander raids, which feature a variety of unique mechanics, including but not limited to, turning into a gorilla. "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."
Nevertheless, Nakagawa understands that balance is key, and stresses that the team will not go overboard in an attempt to force variety. "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."
Thankfully, the lessons learned from Endwalker are already having an impact on FF14, with the team changing their approach towards "placing a great emphasis on enjoyability," something that Nakagawa has described as "a bold decision for us with a lot of unknown factors." - something which has already paid dividends with the battle design of the game's latest Dawntrail expansion proving very popular among players.
