Speculating about the next Final Fantasy XIV expansion is something that I engage in quite a bit, but the fact is that there’s an area of the expansion that I don’t tend to speculate about a great deal. In fact, I don’t see many people speculating about it. We’ll all talk about where the expansion will be set, we talk about what the focus will be in terms of storytelling, we talk about new jobs, we talk about new or returning content… but we don’t talk about the actual leveling experience.
It makes sense, on some level, because the odds are that leveling from 60-70 will be functionally more or less like leveling from 50-60. You do your quests, you gain experience, you get another level. People spam FATEs for subsequent jobs and then have no idea how to actually play the job. The usual. But there are some important questions to ask and answer before we hit another batch of levels, and with the first fan festival just a couple of months away, I think it’s worth considering those points.
What will we gain?
FFXIV has a problem when it comes to its next level cap increase. On the one hand, said increase needs to offer us something new; on the other hand, there’s very little space to do so.
Assuming that the next increase is the same as the Heavensward increase (and it may not be, but that’s a later point), that’s 10 more levels to gain, and going 10 levels without getting something along the way feels kind of pointless. The Heavensward leveling band staggered attribute bonuses and new abilities, but even then, the even levels feel more “real” just because you’re getting new tricks. A one-point increase to the same stat you’ve already been putting all of your points in isn’t nearly as interesting as a shiny new ability that significantly alters your playstyle. If you add on 10 levels to a game without adding any new abilities within that 10-level band, you’ve essentially just added an arbitrary chore to the gameplay without really improving the existing leveling experience.
At the same time? My bars as a Ninja are stuffed. I can fit a couple of additional abilities on my bar as a Machinist just because I have things macroed around Wildfire. Dark Knight is a mess. Paladin is bulky. There are a lot of abilities to deal with, and those hotbars we all rely upon are getting stuffed to the brim with extant abilities. Sure, I can toss in a third bar, but that’s not going to help the console players all that much, and once you’re hitting that many buttons on a semi-regular basis things start getting unwieldy.
Scoff if you want, but there’s a reason World of Warcraft removes and prunes abilities on a regular basis, and it’s largely so you aren’t looking at a 48-button basic layout now. It’s a good thing if for no other reason than the simple fact that new players would look at that and peace out almost instantly. And that was with the fact that each class has multiple specs, some of which won’t really be using certain abilities on the regular.
I don’t think that outright pruning is necessarily in the cards for the next expansion, especially since no job has many “extraneous” abilities; there are always a couple of abilities with less obvious use, but even stuff like Awareness, Fists of Wind, and Quelling Strikes have major bonuses when used correctly. But it does raise the question of how we’ll continue to expand our abilities without losing something. Traits are an obvious answer, as are integrating new abilities in with old abilities; I don’t have any great answers right now, but I suspect we’ll have more ideas as we get closer to release.
What will the leveling pace be?
Before its release, it was touted that 50-60 would take as much time as 1-50. That’s not quite accurate, but it certainly did feel slower. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a positive, especially when it was very easy to run into traps and empty times in leveling secondary jobs or even when moving to the MSQ milestones.
I’ve said before that part of the problem is how de-emphasized leves have been during this expansion; I rarely trouble myself with them at this point while leveling from 50-60, because they’re just not worth the effort. But that’s just one facet of the leveling experience. Quantity of quests and the rewards of same come into play, how many times you’re expected to run dungeons, and yes, how fast you are meant to get to the endgame. The stage-by-stage rollout of tomestones was a good thing, but it also did put a limit on how fast you were “supposed” to level if you didn’t want to miss anything. I was able to reach that point without too much effort myself, but the point remains.
That pace is also going to affect leveling other jobs. The early stages of Heavensward made leveling a secondary job much more of a chore, simply because it was so slow to do; you had a much harder limit to how many jobs you could possibly have ready to go at the level cap even without weekly tomestone caps. That’s viable, but it also drives people harder into picking one job as a main instead of swapping between different options. I’d like to think that leveling will be a bit less onerous in the next expansion even without beast tribe quests to smooth things over; while the slow pace made sense for Heavensward, it’s something that could definitely stand to be addressed, especially when we’ll have another set of jobs to level up all over again.
What new wrinkles will be added?
Daily Hunts aren’t explicitly a new thing in Heavensward, but their method of operation is new. The idea that hunts are something you complete as part and parcel with the leveling process was a different element of the game, and it wound up leading to a different environment in which you were more likely to jaunt from zone to zone as part of the leveling experience. I’d like to see that continue in the next expansion, but I’d also like to see something new hit the scene… and that could be almost anything.
The addition of the Deep Dungeon, Aquapolis, synced quests, and exploratory missions means that there are lots of bits of existing endgame content that could easily be expanded into the leveling sphere for the next expansion. That’s going to have an impact on how the expansion actually plays. At launch, Heavensward emphasized running dungeons far more than the base game because dungeons were far and away the best source of efficient leveling experience; it meant that people were almost always running dungeons. So what about the future? What will await in the next level boost?
I don’t know all of the answers. But I think these are questions that are worth asking and speculating about simply because they are going to make up a good portion of our time spent playing the game. Even if we get another spread of three new jobs (which I think is likely), it’s the 60-70 experience that’s going to define the expansion as a whole, and that’s worth asking about and investigating.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next time around, I’m going to be heading around and picking up the Yo-Kai Watch crossover bits, and taking a look at the event from the perspective of someone who’s not a fan of the source game but also does love crossovers.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.
