Wisdom of Nym: Little boosts for Final Fantasy XIV

When I talk about games that provide a whole lot of quality-of-life fixes, I generally point to Final Fantasy XIV as a perfect example. Heck, when I want to talk about games that give a lot to roleplayers, the game still tops the list; it still impresses me that the game offers context-sensistive /sit commands and the ability to choose between multiple poses while sitting in chairs or on the ground, and you can even aim for the ground if the context would enforce a chair or bench nearby. That offers no gameplay advantage, it’s just nice.

The game does have some quality-of-life features that are conspicuously missing, though, and many of them are missing for no real reason at all. More housing wards with larger space, for example, would be a phenomenal quality-of-life boost… but it’s also demanding on the system and on finances, thus making it a more complex issue. But there are quality features that could be implemented with minimal effort that also still aren’t there, and it seems only fair to bring those up for the future.

More universal emotes/poses

The /cpose stance for drawn weapons is great. What’s not so great is that it’s segmented by gender; every male character has the same Dragoon pose options, and every female one has the same pose options. But someone might want to use the male pose on a female character, and the system currently has no way to allow you to do that. For that matter, the game can’t segment your /cpose selection based on weapon; either you’re in an alternate pose or you’re in the default pose, full stop.

For some games, this would seem to just be a thing, but we’ve seen how much effort goes into rigging several emotes universally. We’ve already got about a dozen variants on animations like /pose and /joy, and based on what we’ve seen it’s probably not incredibly difficult to rig the emotes for other races; I’d love to see more emotes be made universally accessible regardless of your race. There are miqo’te players who do not necessarily want sugoi kawaii neko-chan in every possible emote, for example.

I mark this as a pretty low cost to implement because, well, most of the hard work is already done. It’s just about moving the animation around. Perhaps a bit harder to code into the interface, but hardly an insurmountable or grand challenge.

Store/dungeon dressing rooms

When the newest items showed up on the Mog Station, I was interested in picking it up for my main. So I immediately rush to a city, hoping to find someone who was already wearing it so I could try the item on and see how it looked. Not just for dye colors, but also for important things like “do the sleeves cover longer gauntlets” and “which parts of the belt are on the pants or the top?”

This is one of the more consistently irritating issues that we have to deal with; when so much of your aesthetic is tied up in these outfits, not being able to try before you buy can be very frustrating for those of us with an eye toward fashion. You can’t convince me that this is a matter of trying to sell more, either; it’s purely down to the lack of an in-game interface to buy this stuff.

Amusingly enough, this also comes into play when you’re dealing with another source of outfits: dungeons. When new dungeon sets are added, you have to spend some time guessing which of the preview sets is meant for a given spec, which can often influence a lot of whether or not you want to strive for that set as a whole. Offering us a more efficient way to try these things on in general would do wonders for finding out which outfits are worth getting and which ones are comfortably forgettable.

Useful fishing information

Fishing is, without a doubt, my least favorite gathering profession. This has always been true and I make no pretense otherwise. But I feel that it’s exacerbated by the fact that fishing is designed to fill your inventory with garbage without letting you know if it’s garbage or not. Every fish you catch can belong to one of several categories:

• Used for crafting an item (usually food)
• Used for levequest turn-ins
• Used for Grand Company turn-ins
• Placed in an aquarium
• Used for collectable turn-ins

But it could belong to none of these categories. And aside from the aquarium, the tooltip of a fish gives you no indication about which is the case. You have to search all of the above to find out if a given fish is actually worth anything to anyone or if it’s basically just vendor trash for a few gil – and given that this is a game with an absolute dearth of vendor trash, that’s saying something.

Seriously, there are still debates about whether or not the various pieces that are explicitly meant for selling are useful for anything else. That’s how reluctant people are to believe in vendor trash.

The thing is that it wouldn’t take much; just a line, akin to other trash, to specifically tell players that this particular fish is of most value to vendors. Then you’d know right away if you had caught a useful fish or just garbage. It wouldn’t help with actual inventory storage, but it would at least provide a useful guide.

Better painting unlocks

The Kugane jumping puzzle is a problem. I completely understand why it’s there, and I completely understand why the sightseeing log is there; however, it’s also not exactly a fun way to unlock something that people might want for other reasons. Trying to complete that puzzle is difficult and requires a fair bit of practice, and for some people it’s just outright not doable; those people are going to have every other sightseeing log available, but that one will mean that they unlock absolutely nothing.

This is kind of ridiculous. It’s also kind of ridiculous that we unlock paintings only after full clears, though, which means that the solution suggests itself. Unlocking, say, a special additional painting for clearing all sightseeing log entries or achievements would have the same ultimate reward; placing them all behind a jumping puzzle just makes things needlessly tedious.

For that matter, we could really use the Joyous Painter somewhere other than Idyllshire, but then we’re getting into NPCs that should really have more places to visit. Why is Khloe only in Idyllshire when she’s still our only source for our weekly books? That doesn’t seem reasonable…

Let us just mail our alts

Seriously, this is just one of the strangest limitations of the game; I cannot imagine it would take much for us to be able to auto-add our other characters on the same server to our friend list. It’s possible to do it now with a bit of trickery, so just remove the need for trickery, why not? It saves so much time.

Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Feel free to leave your own picks for odd and resource-light changes for quality of life in the comments, as well. Next week, let’s talk about the Alliance Raids we’ve seen so far as a whole, noting the big accomplishments and drawbacks of each.