Here’s something that’s important to note about Final Fantasy XIV’s Naoki Yoshida: The man tends to say exactly what he means and not a word more. This is not a negative thing or something to be apprehensive about, of course; it’s just a statement of fact that when Yoshida says something, it’s always worth paying attention to the things he didn’t say as well because they’re deliberate. And with that in mind, I ask you to consider exactly how many dungeons we’re going to get with this patch series.
The answer, at this point, is “at least three of the new Criterion dungeons.” Because at this point we haven’t actually been told that we’re getting a new dungeon with each patch. It’s been implied, but technically speaking, our preview of future content only mentioned the new Trust expansion we’ll be getting for the dungeons, the full series of content for Myths of the Realm and Pandæmonium, the aforementioned dungeons, and a new deep dungeon. There’s no certainty that we’re getting anything more.
Before any of you jump to the comments with theories that we’re going to be doing the exact same dungeons in Expert roulette for the next two years, I would invite you to slow your roll just a tad. The point here is not to say that we won’t get a new dungeon with every patch, a bare minimum that’s been long established and maintained through the game’s history up to this point. Rather, the point is that we have not actually been told yet that it’s happening, and I think it behooves us all to keep that in mind a little.
This is especially true because if you look at the raft of content we have lined up, right now our dance card is looking pretty full. We’ve got a whole new PvP mode and a whole new set of PvP incentives, a whole new kind of dungeon, a whole new sort of content with Island Sanctuaries, and all of the “usual” content on top of that. That’s not even counting all of the rebalancing of old content needed amidst the larger plans for the game, either!
Put it more simply, there’s too much extra stuff in the schedule for me to immediately believe that we’re getting 100% of Shadowbringers content plus all of this other stuff. In some ways Shadowbringers was a bit lighter on content than you might have expected, but at least in my mind, I’m looking at the list of content that’s expected and wondering where some things are going to be reduced along the way.
One obvious area, of course, is that this expansion will not have Ishgard Restoration or even the immediate equivalent. But I think we should think a little about other content we are assuming will be there that, well… might not be on the list at the moment.
Case in point? Relic zones.
We’ve gotten full-fledged zones complete with new ability layouts for the past two expansions now as a part of our regular content rollouts. Eureka, sadly, was widely disliked for a variety of reasons, chief among those reasons being that it was a throwback to Final Fantasy XI-style grouping and content consumption in a way that prompted some cute references in rewards but did not actually satisfy what most people were looking for. (It got better in later zones, to be fair.) By contrast, Bozja was far more positively received, though not without its issues and criticism along the way.
However, Bozja also had at its heart a different problem: It wasn’t actually great for building your relic. It also wasn’t great for leveling. It was, in large part, content that was great at being Bozja, but it was also content you didn’t engage with just on its own because you’d have no real reason to do it unless you were working on your relic weapons… which it also wasn’t great at doing. So it was some interesting fights and ideas that felt like your relic weapons were tacked on at the end, and that just didn’t work all that well on a whole.
So here’s what I’m wondering: Are Criterion dungeons meant to replace these systems altogether?
Think about it for a moment. Part of Eureka’s failing was that it was the only way to get your relic weapon and was kind of tedious for doing that. By contrast, Bozja was meant to serve multiple functions, but doesn’t serve any of them particularly well. If you were looking at something to move off the list, maybe building big open-world zones just for relic weapons don’t actually work all that well? Maybe this is content that just isn’t serving its purpose and a couple of experiments showed that on a whole.
Criterion dungeons, on the other hand, give you a framework for playing with new abilities along the way (keep in mind that since they scale from 1-4 players, some form of role shifting is very plausible). They let you keep the focus on the sort of encounters that the game generally does best, and they have the potential to provide a few different kinds of content at once without carrying the resource cost of building a couple big zones along the way. These could easily be the new experiment for the central mechanic of relic content.
Does that make me sad? A little bit, yes, simply because I have enjoyed the experiments being done with Eureka and Bozja on a whole, even if they both fall into various shades of “not quite working.” Including zone-wide objectives and open-world content is not a bad idea. It’s just that, well… grinding enemies and grinding FATEs by different potential names isn’t exactly a compelling gameplay loop. Having open-world zones to do this for relic weapons is a useful idea, but as mentioned, when Bozja introduced its gameplay for this stuff, most of it was more efficiently obtained by not visiting Bozja.
Now, of course, I don’t know that this is going away. It could be nothing is. But assuming a regular stream of dungeons, alliance raids, normal raids, and trials, it also wouldn’t surprise me if our relic grind is a little more constrained this time around. And considering that this time we’re definitely getting a deep dungeon for grinding as needed and a whole new sort of dungeon content, that’s probably all right.
Having said all of this, watch me be proven totally wrong and we get new zones with a new set of mechanics to advance our relic weapon and this time they’re awesome. It’d be the sort of thing that I would find absolutely joyous to be wrong about, for the record. More content is hardly a negative thing.
We’re probably still getting a regular drip of dungeons and trials even though they weren’t mentioned explicitly. But some of the other content that wasn’t mentioned is a little more ambiguous.
Feedback, of course, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to talk about… the next live letter because holy carp, that’s March 4th! That’s soon.
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.
