I've said it before, but I actually really like Forked Tower; Final Fantasy 14's latest 48-player dungeon that came bundled with field operation mode Occult Crescent. What I don't like, however, is all of the needless ground work it comes with.
From having to try and shepherd several eight-player groups into a single instance, to waiting around for a specific weather condition, and then praying that curious passersby wouldn't unwittingly leave a member of your static in the lurch with the dungeon's entry lottery… yeah, it's been a lot of artificial inflation to the difficulty for parts of the process that should be relatively frictionless.
Now, Square Enix is making steps to change that—including one that it surprisingly fast-tracked earlier this month—but the reality still remains: Forked Tower requires far too much foreplanning and external organisation to be reasonably viable for groups of strangers crossing paths in the moment.
It's a reality director and producer Naoki Yoshida seems all too aware of. In a recent interview with RPGSite, he admitted that the team failed to nail the vibe. "I do feel that Forked Tower: Blood was a misstep in development," he said.
"It wasn't meant to be hardcore content, so to speak. The intention was that it might be more difficult at first, but over time more players might be willing to take on the challenge; yet, in the end we made it too difficult for players to even get into the raid in the first place."
I do find it kind of funny that Yoshida claims it wasn't supposed to be hardcore content. It's not on the level of savage raids, sure—most of the bosses can be easily handled with a good shotcaller carrying folk through the fights—but you certainly can't sleep your way through it, and there are parts where you can end up killing your entire crew if you're not playing your part properly.
RPGSite says that Yoshida does sort of acknowledge that, however, with him noting there may have been too much emphasis on personal responsibilities and how those failings can quickly snowball into a failed run.
I do think Creative Studio 3 was teetering right on the edge of correctly striking that balance, and Yoshida says the team is revising its roadmap to incorporate Forked Tower's feedback into the next round of field operations when Patch 7.5 lands in the future.
