I know I’ve said this many times and in a variety of contexts, but for all that there’s a certain amount of expected content from Final Fantasy XIV at any given interval, it never stops making me happy that there’s also a good chunk of unexpected content as well. Variant dungeons are something very new for the game and a new way of trying to pace things out within the game’s update structure, and while I’m not entirely sure if they’re going to work on a whole, I do have some thoughts.
But before that, I actually want to talk about the change that we know is coming to Savage with the next update. It’s a small change, but it’s also a significant one in that it pushes players to engage with the content in a different fashion. And even as someone who doesn’t really play Savage (read: I absolutely do not play Savage), I think it’s worth unpacking this change a little for its immediate and longer-term impact.
Slower Savagery
In the broadest strokes, there’s honestly not a whole lot that’s different about having Savage take place a week after the patch launches or having Savage start the same day that the patch drops. But in a lot of ways it does actually have a lot of small knock-on effects, and one of the biggest ones is that it makes patch day a lot more relaxing for Savage progression because you don’t have to craft a whole set of new gear, pentameld it, and start learning the fights on the same day.
Whether or not this is what you want to do or not, this is the reality of starting progression in this game. When you are facing a new patch, the first thing you need to do on the day it arrives is get your best possible gear crafted in HQ form because a full set of HQ 610 gear is going to be better than your old 600 gear for taking on these new challenges. It needs to be pentamelded, too, and that means buying the heck out of the otherwise not-terribly-useful Grade IX materia. Smart quartermasters have been stocking up on that materia for the past several months while it’s cheap, sure, but the thing about pentamelding is that you will almost always blow through more of your materia than you think you should.
Keep in mind that you have to do this, at minimum, for eight people. Even if you have a full progression Savage group made up of dedicated omnicrafters who can all do this individually, that’s a lot of work to do on one day, getting all the new crafting books necessary, finding the nodes, gathering the materials, figuring out the ideal foods for HQ crafting, and so forth. And for a lot of progression groups there are a couple of crafters who do all of this stuff while the rest of the team supplies materials/money/etc.
That’s kind of not fun. And while every game can (and should) have a lot of different kinds of fun – one of which is pushing hard against restrictions in order to do your best – it’s always best for designers to be asking on a regular basis if a particular thing being not fun is actually serving the overall purpose of the game or not. And in the case of the enormous pressure just to get started with progression Savage gameplay? This wasn’t serving anything beyond making the game less fun for no real gain.
So now it’s got a week-long delay before the savage race starts up, time to give progression-minded players more space to get used to the Normal fights, get gear ready, and coordinate over a slightly longer time scale. That’s a good thing.
Variant Varies
So the interesting thing about Variant Dungeons, right from the start, is that this is not actually a new dungeon. This is a set of three new dungeons all using the same map and using a steadily ramping set of difficulty mechanics to make things more challenging, ranging from a version that scales solely with one person to a much more challenging version that not only pushes you into a strict time limit but outright prevents resurrections.
That particular change is something that FFXIV hasn’t tried before, and I think it’s a really fascinating tweak. I wasn’t a big fan of how the game tried adjusting healing with the Monster Hunter crossover, but I think the way it handles raising and retrying fights is actually much more fundamental to the game’s overall structure. It is very possible to clear a lot of content in this game with a certain number of people just happily being floor tanks on every single fight, especially because some people play the game with the assumption that it doesn’t matter, just raise me when you can.
This assumption, for better or worse, is baked into the game at every level and through every single dungeon. But it’s interesting to see that tweaked as the primary difficulty change in the Savage Criterion dungeons. Someone dies and they’re out, and that means that everyone needs to be on the ball and the penalties for death are far more severe.
On the one hand, this sounds a little bit odd to me as well, since the scaling version feels like it’s definitely much more casual-friendly right down to allowing you to change jobs as you go through the dungeon so you can tailor your party (or your, um… self) to the particular challenges you’re facing. It’s an interesting decision to have a dungeon at once be painted as a very casual experience on one hand and a very challenging one on the other.
Still, that’s not to say that this can’t work or even shouldn’t be attempted. This is an attempt to give players a different sort of challenge in a different context, to design fights that aren’t set up the same way as fights in the main game. Much like Delubrum Reginae, it’s a new form of content that gives the designers different knobs to tweak and a different set of variables to explore.
This means that there’s another question to consider: What will the rewards be from this particular content? Is this going to tie into Manderville Weapons? Let’s not forget that the first Hildibrand questline directly involved the fall of Sil’dih being brought up in memory and we don’t know who we’ll be exploring the dungeon with beyond “a certain NPC.” And let’s be realistic, all of the Hildibrand questlines have touched upon some pretty important history along the way…
Does that mean that’s what we’re getting from these dungeons? I don’t know yet. But I’m curious to learn more, and that seems like it might be a more compelling reward than just tomestones and/or another set of high-end gear for equivalent challenge, though I wouldn’t object to that either.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or by mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to take a look at something not related to the live letter (we’ve pretty well mined out all of the topics from that) and instead talk about something near and dear to my heart: mandatory content.
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.
