You know what’s going to be very interesting with Gods Revel, Lands Tremble? Unlike a usual x.3 patch for Final Fantasy XIV, this one isn’t going to feel like the game has just settled into a comfortable cadence as if it can just sort of sit for an extended period of time. We’re entering the height of the story tension, not the resolution before the prelude to our next expansion starts up. It’s a subtle change, but it’s a notable one, and I’m definitely curious about how that change will influence the overall feel of this particular patch.
But that’s not the biggest thing of interest with the most recent live letter; there’s a lot happening with the next patch that we already know about, so let’s start breaking it down piece by piece from the announcement and the trailers. Obviously, there are still some pretty noteworthy things to ask questions about, but at the end of the day I think it’s a given that we’re all excited. Let’s be excited together.
Dear Gods
First of all, anyone and everyone complaining about Menphina’s design is a maidenless coward and deserves to be smote by every deity in the game’s pantheon with extreme prejudice. She looks great. All of the designs we’ve seen so far look great, which is awesome, and I love them.
Obviously, it’s difficult to suss out any particular mechanics from this early preview, but some people suspect that we’ll be seeing five deities overall in combat for this stretch. That would leave us with an as-yet-undetermined final boss, which… honestly always seemed pretty likely to me, honestly. I mean, it might seem odd to think of having the game’s overall deity lineup not actually being the full set of bosses, but it also just makes more sense that way.
It also means a light trolling of the user base by surprising us with an unexpected final boss. Which is, let’s face it, entirely on-brand for this particular team.
Whether or not we actually wind up fighting more gods than previously expected, it definitely looks at a glance that Halone is going to cap off our trip through this segment. It should be a lot of fun, although that is itself pretty normal and expected. And as always, I’m curious about how the lore for this is going to work, especially since (as mentioned before) the wholly spurious reason for fighting from the first stretch has already been revealed as, well, spurious.
Zero Hour
As I had supposed before, the new dungeon is quite explicitly set in Garlemald, which will mean saying hello to the Twins again and such. I feel odd about this particular development – not because I’m not happy to see Alisaie and Alphinaud but because, well, the whole narrative conceit at the end of the main story was that we were going to have to deal with the fact that the Scions were at least ostensibly no longer going to be an active component of world politics. It was time for the world to stand on its own, so to speak, and while we immediately wound up hooking up with Estinien and Y’shtola again, it seemed like that would be it for a while.
Instead, it feels as if we’re checking back in with everyone, and odds are nonzero that at the start of the next expansion we’ll just all be hanging out and doing stuff together as a bit unit like not much had changed after all. This is a distinctly different set of affairs that the implication that we’d be starting to meet some new characters.
Of course, Zero is obviously around and taking part in the things unfolding in the MSQ at present, and Zero is wonderful, so I’m very happy to have her around. I just kind of was expecting things to be a little different from what we appear to be getting right now. The new dungeon looks interesting, and I am eager to see how things break down within it in mechanical terms; part of me suspects that it’s going to take some lessons from the Sil’dih Subterrane with its bosses.
We’ve also got at least one ominous and potentially strange line from Golbez hinting at the future, which still feels wide open in terms of where his ultimate plans are going. I’m curious about how all of this is going to shake out over time, and I’m eager to see more! I’m just perhaps a little surprised at how little our cast has changed.
Fight night every night
So as much as I went fairly hard on the game’s first PvP season, I have to admit that this second one just isn’t really doing it for me. Part of it, I admit, is purely a me thing. I’m not really eager to have another dragon mount, and the crystals I’m earning no longer go toward any rewards I particularly want. There’s a paucity of things to buy right now, and that’s understandable but still an issue.
This also ties into the larger issue that we’ve had for a little while where there’s just not enough stuff currently banked up to totally make the PvP reward structure work. I don’t mean that there are not enough absolute things, but it’s not hard to get everything you want and then find yourself lacking in any particular reason to keep pursuing rewards. If the big track reward doesn’t entice you, the crystals probably aren’t going to, either.
It looks like the next season is adding some new stuff to the reward vendors, though, which is nice! Hopefully that’s enough to pull me back in. I like the structure of how rewards work right now and I like the concept, but it still has a bit of a paucity of truly compelling rewards – which, at least from my perspective, is a harder problem to solve but also a more vital one. Your distance might vary.
There’s more stuff coming, of course – we know that we’re getting another deep dungeon and more Island Sanctuary content, but the former isn’t coming until the interim patch and the latter basically sounds like more of the same with no more new information. I’m curious to see how the changes to Paladin play out, especially as right now the job plays in a solid fashion but has some notable performance issues. Also interesting as Machinist, in many ways, feels like it’s in a worse overall spot compared to Paladin.
But a lot of this is going to be a matter of waiting and seeing how things actually shake out on January 10th. Fortunately, that means we don’t have much longer to wait! I can make it another couple of weeks, I think. Hopefully.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to take a look at things FFXIV could do to improve the relevance of older zones and areas. Yes, I know, it’s not something the game exactly fails at now, but there’s always room to do better.
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.
