In Final Fantasy XIV‘s version 1.0, the Coral Tower was not home to the Marauder’s Guild. The Marauder’s Guild was, in fact, located in the southern part of Limsa Lominsa aboard the Astalacia. The Coral Tower was home to the Musketeer’s Guild, which was not actually in the game at launch, but much like Arcanist, it was clearly intended to be added in post-launch content. Numerous characters used a pistol as an offhand or even a main-hand weapon, and systems for doing just this were clearly meant to be in the game but weren’t quite ready for launch.
Obviously, none of that happened. And it would in fact be totally irrelevant… if we didn’t still have the same gun-wielding NPCs in the tower to keep reminding us about it.
FFXIV has an odd relationship with its own past in this regard. It kind of has to. I mean, think for a moment how it would be if your new boss walked into your workspace, looked at what you had spent the past few years building, and then said he hated all of it and wanted to blow it up. But the interesting thing to note is that what was the case in version 1.0 kind of doesn’t matter… except when it does matter because we keep being told to look at it again.
Here’s a prime example: Originally, Arcanist was another post-launch disciple of magic meant to be added that used a mechanical staff and set special magical “traps” for enemies. Urianger’s class was meant to be Arcanist even then, and in certain moments the game uses his 1.0 weapon! What does this mean?
Well… nothing. We have Arcanist; it is totally different from what 1.0’s Arcanist was meant to be. Do you think about 1.0’s Fencer or Mystic? Yes, they were meant for later addition as well. No, they’re not relevant at all or brought up even in passing. That was all a holdover from a version of the game that is not being maintained or built further, so no one cares about it, nor should you. These are interesting bits of trivia, but they are not relevant to the current game.
So it’s easy to say that the musketeers are the same thing. Except they really aren’t because they’re still running around.
Whatever the 1.0 Arcanist was going to be like, it has been wholly supplanted. We do not see 1.0 mecha-staff Arcanists running around. There is no dialogue reminding us about them. No major characters use the weapon (in fact, there are no more Arcanists among our usual battle crew at this point). We sometimes go back to the Arcanist’s Guild, where everyone has books and summons Carbuncle. What was supposed to happen in 1.0? Irrelevant.
I don’t know what Fencer was going to be like, but I imagine it was meant to be the basis to build yourself a Red Mage. But that’s not a thing. We have actual Red Mages, and so what things were going to be is not relevant. The closest vestige to weirdness there we have is some Heavensward fights where Alisaie uses a Gladiator sword and animations because Red Mage wasn’t programmed in then.
And for the most part this makes sense. It’s very clear that we are not going to get an expansion dedicated to exploring the parts of the map that were present in 1.0 but are inaccessible now; sure, I would mark out for that, but I don’t see that happening at any point. I don’t know what Hironobu Sakaguchi had planned for the airship landings that were scattered around the zones in 1.0, but it also doesn’t matter because what could they possibly offer that we don’t already have? The old version is gone. It is not happening. Its elements have historical trivia value, but that’s it.
…except when we keep being reminded of them.
A good example of this? Travanchet. He was a minor antagonist who showed up in the Limsa Lominsa questline and seemed to be an Ascian, notably casting no shadow and stealing the “key” to Seal Rock before vanishing. This wouldn’t mean much, except he shows up again in the Alexander questline in flashbacks, offering Mide the means to summon the eponymous Primal. And since then, nothing. He’s never been mentioned again.
Now, is that crucial? Do we need to know who he is? No, but it does mean that because he’s been brought up again, he’s easier to remember, and he feels like a dangling thread that has never been brought up. It’d be easy to assume that the name was a pseudonym and he was some other Ascian we knew about, but because he’s never been addressed or mentioned since, it feels conspicuous.
Because we’re reminded of it, it feels relevant. Not like payoff for something otherwise forgotten, but like someone just swooping in at the last moment to remind you about a plot element that never paid off. Andy, did you hear about this one?
The fact that 1.0 was ultimately a failed experiment is a sad thing, but I also don’t think it’s inherently a tragic one. I obviously really love this game, and I’m not sad that it isn’t ultimately the intensely flawed game that we got at launch. I’m all right with the fact that we don’t have the job-specific throwing weapons from 1.0 or the hints of different systems and so forth because while those were all really cool ideas and I would have liked to see a version of the game where they worked, they… didn’t. The game was bad. The current game is, in fact, a better title! Controversial statement, I know, but it’s true.
And I don’t mind putting the version of the game that was back more than a decade ago out to pasture, except when the current game feels the need to remind me about it. It’s of a different character than when the game feels the need to remind me about things that are currently in the game and accessible and present. Getting another callback to the Crystal Tower makes sense. Getting a callback to Hamlet Defense would be just weird, and if it were going to come up, I would expect it to go somewhere.
It’s very clear that Yoshida and the entire development team is more than happy to move on from whatever the plan might have been back when the game fist launched. The original plans for Titan and Leviathan are no longer relevant and haven’t been for years. We’ve had a fight with Leviathan, and in Shadowbringers we had a fight with a remixed version of Leviathan, short of giving us a Leviathan-Egi (WHEN) there’s not much more to be done with the oarfish.
Yet if every time we were reminded that there had been a different story that was going to find the Sahagin doing different things, at a certain point you’d want to know why that wasn’t being paid off. This is how I feel about reminders of 1.0. As the Barenaked Ladies put it, how am I supposed to remember you when you won’t let me forget?
Feedback, as always, is welcome down in the comments or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, it’s going to be time to talk about our first post-Dawntrail live letter, so that’s going to be a whole thing!
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.
