Wisdom of Nym: Final Fantasy XIV’s seasonal events, dungeon mining, and leaving Eorzea

Not every topic that I can talk about in this column is actually a good column topic because some stuff just… isn’t robust enough.

I’m probably not going to surprise anyone with the revelation that I play a lot of Final Fantasy XIV. With friends and alone, even. I’m kind of happy that the game is not on Steam because it’d be sobering to see how many hours I’ve clocked into the game thus far, especially when I still have more stuff to do. I don’t mean to say that as if I’m an unparalleled master of the game, but simply to illustrate that I play the game a lot, and thus I think about it a great deal.

But sometimes I have stuff that I want to talk about that just doesn’t fill out a full column. So here are three such topics, sort of off-jots for the game as a whole. Really, some things are worth discussing even if they don’t make it to a full column’s length.

Seasonal event misfires

I rather like this year’s Moonfire Faire, on a whole; the new emotes are an awesome way to nudge the lore a little bit, and there’s always the sheer fun of nodding to silly ideas. But it also does highlight a couple of problems, starting with the fact that one of the quests is sitting out in La Noscea being trolled by people who can just AoE all of the required enemies down without offering players the slightest chance of catching it.

The other is that after the initial quests, the most efficient way to get event rewards is to just… camp two FATEs endlessly. This is a recurring problem that event content in the game has anyway, where the designers seem to think that FATEs are something other than incredibly boring. A lot of players take part in them, but that’s just a natural result of having content people can engage in with minimal actual investment. Jump in, hit a button for an AoE for a while, jump out.

One of the things that the game has been struggling with for a while is finding a way to have repeatable content that doesn’t get obnoxious, but the most recent few events have all relied rather heavily on waiting for spawns and then jumping in on a massive crush of players spamming abilities. I like the event in concept, but in practice it very quickly goes from being interesting to repetitive, and the downside is that seasonal events are the perfect time to experiment with new ways of doing repeated content. We don’t have to just fall back into the same traps again and again; if a seasonal approach doesn’t work, it doesn’t have to be brought back.

It’s a little disheartening. Not massively so, but it kind of stings that the event winds up hitting an off-key note rather than a positive one, despite some really nifty emotes and worldbuilding. I am glad it’s not just another year of swimsuits, though.

Dungeon mining

Based of the pattern of the past few patches, it’s pretty easy to guess that we’ll be heading back into Snowcloak in patch 3.4 and into the Keeper of the Lake in patch 3.5. All of the Heavensward hard modes have been based upon the level 50 new dungeons so far, so there’s good reason to expect that the pattern will hold.

The next expansion, then, will have plenty of stuff to work with, with all of the Heavensward dungeons being available as hard mode upgrades. But that’s assuming that we’re done upgrading dungeons from there they are now.

In the 2.x series, we know why there were no hard modes for Aurum Vale, Toto-Rak, Cutter’s Cry, and Darkhold; the dungeons basically had to be designed from the ground up, after all. But there’s more reason for us to revisit them in the next expansion. Even that, however, doesn’t change the fact that we could very easily go back into still harder versions of the dungeon. Nothing is preventing us from getting Sastasha (Extreme) in the 4.x series, just by way of example. And while every dungeon map seems to be designed around one alteration, the tweaks necessary for one could easily segue into another.

One of the many parts of the game that I like is the fact that there’s still so much of the game world that we know is there but haven’t yet seen. Parts of the world from 1.0 are still fenced off, for example, and there are obvious points of exploration that have yet to be open to us just yet. There are all sorts of things to be driven through those gaps; the Deep Dungeon shows us what’s possible when a minor part of the game’s narrative is explored in more depth. It’s interesting to think that the future may well lie further in the past. Who knows? A four-person version of content like the Crystal Tower isn’t even out of the question for the future…

Will we ever leave Eorzea?

One of the things that I see thrown around sometimes with speculation that bothers me is when an argument about something is “Square-Enix could do this.” The point of speculation isn’t what could be done, but what will probably be done. Sure, the next expansion could send us all to Radz-at-Han or Meracydia; it could also be set in the middle of Midgar from Final Fantasy VII, and it could replace Alphinaud with a talking fern named Captain Fluffleaf. But I wouldn’t put money on any of that.

That having been said, I think there is an oddly compelling possibility that we’ll never get to see what’s left of Doma, or Radz-at-Han, or anywhere beyond Eorzea. There’s still quite a lot of this landmass left unexplored, and I can see at least two more expansions being mined out of what we already know to be present.

I’m not just talking about spaces we know to be there because of the map, even if we can’t currently access them; there’s more to Mor Dhona, Thanalan, Coerthas, and the Black Shroud at the very least. We’ve also got Ala Mhigo to explore, our likely destination for the next expansion, but there’s also the islands in the Rothlyt Sound, the land bridge toward Ilsabard, the islands south of Vylbrand… there’s a lot to explore in our backyard, figuratively speaking.

I don’t think it’s necessarily a given, but I do think that it’s definitely plausible that we may wind up with everything converging in this general location, and there’s space enough to explore. It’d be a bit sad to not go hopping through the world a bit more, but it would also be plausible at the same time; with so much tied up with Eorzea, the adventure comes to us rather than the other way around.

Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com; I’m curious to know if people liked this particular format, since that will influence whether or not I do it again. Next time around, I want to talk about some pie-in-the-sky hopes I have for the next expansion, which may or may not pan out in the long run.