I haven’t exactly been shy about mentioning that 2024 has been a terrible year for me, but then I look at the trailer for Final Fantasy XIV’s next patch and… oh, Vana’diel March, my beloved. Like, every part of my brain says “look, this is just purely shuttling a very specific bit of nostalgic dopamine into your mind-maw, it is a trick, you should not fall for it, it’s so obvious,” but I do. I fall for it so hard. The very clear trick works on me. I am not sorry about this, either.
That’s not to say that I am an automatic easy mark for everything on preview in the second and final live letter ahead of the patch on November 12th (which feels remarkably fast compared to our first preview, but maybe that’s just my conditions), but starting with that music was sure an easy layup for me. Still, there’s plenty to discuss about what we’ve seen so far, so let’s do exactly that in today’s Wisdom of Nym – starting with at least one thing that I see come up repeatedly that’s just not true: People claiming that content has been delayed from this patch.
Now, on the one hand, I do sort of get it. If you’re excited for variant dungeons, or new field operations, or the whole interstellar restoration thing? You want it now. If you’re excited for Beastmaster you want it now. As it stands, the patch is going to have Expert rotation (which unfortunately will still include Dreadwalk) and the Vana’diel alliance raid, and while we’ll get our allied dailies and custom deliveries in a little bit that’s still not a whole slice of new content!
But it’s not delayed, for two reasons. The first and very obvious reason: This is all entirely normal. Eureka didn’t release until 4.25 (and everyone hated it). Bozja started releasing in 5.25, but the actual field area wasn’t until 5.35 (and a lot of people still hated it). Island Sanctuary was 6.2. First variant dungeon? Yep, 6.25. In fact, the only exception was Ishgard Restoration, which had a tiny area available with 5.15 in no small part because I imagine the developers wanted to make sure the competitive aspect was actually working.
The other reason it’s not delayed? It was never stated to be coming in patch 7.1. That’s kind of necessary for something to be delayed. So while I definitely would prefer more content I will ever do to another Ultimate I don’t care about, I can’t really gripe that it changed the schedule that existed only in my head.
What I can gripe about is the look of the gear coming out with the first Final Fantasy XI raid, which is remarkably drab. Now, I get why it looks that way because it’s based on the Ark Angel gear and that’s a very iconic set that it took players ages to get access to for cosmetics in the game. However, that doesn’t mean the set looks particularly good, especially when FFXI has a whole lot of iconic and gorgeous gear that could have been drawn upon instead. It looks as if it’ll dye nicely, and that’s great, but the whole point as a concept when it was first released was that it was specifically black!
Honestly I feel generally less than hype about the gear appearances we saw during the live letter outside of the dungeon gear; the Cloud of Darkness gear looks potentially interesting, but the new weapon design arsenal is not the style I particularly like, so I’m not really hype about that. (They’re probably going to be the new PvP weapons with the patch, since otherwise they’ll be coming from Cloud of Darkness and that just doesn’t seem likely to me.) And that’s fine – not everything needs to tickle my aesthetic sensibilities – but it does mean that most of my interest in patch gear will be on more dual-channel slots getting added or more glasses.
I do think it’s interesting that the Cloud of Darkness fight is also going to be specifically doable with 12 people in a pre-formed party. This is useful information because even if it is balanced for 24 players, the fact that 12 people is possible indicates that it’s kind of tuned around that. Most large-scale challenging content is kind of tuned to have a certain number of players who know what they’re doing and a certain number of players who are there to functionally add live bodies to the mix.
The fact that it sounds like you can also get automatically matched for it is interesting, especially given the difficulty it’s supposedly pitched at. I’m curious to see how people will take this and what completion rates will look like, so a lot of my attention is geared toward seeing how this shakes out when that content is implemented at the end of the year.
Beyond that, there’s a lot of speculation. It definitely looks as if the FFXI raid is going to be covering the game’s base story and first expansion; we can see Jeuno, what looks like the Sanctuary of Zi’tah, Tu’lia, and Castle Zvahl in the trailer, along with what appear to be boss fights with Prishe, the Shadow Lord, the Ark Angels, and possibly FFXI’s version of Nidhogg. (That would make sense for Zi’tah.) The last one might be a non-boss encounter, of course, and it’s worth noting that Prishe herself doesn’t really overlap with those first two stories, so it might be a bit more complex than that.
We’re also apparently going to get an answer to the most relevant yet irrelevant question of the base Dawntrail story regarding who Gulool Ja’s mother is (we know it’s a lady Mamool Ja, we’ve always known that, but the base story doesn’t say because it… just wasn’t important then, apparently), which doesn’t really hint at much of where this story is going to go. Which I like, actually. There’s an obvious aftermath and it’s clear we’re in the more familiar epilogue territory, but it’s more akin to Shadowbringers and Stormblood in that the shape of things isn’t immediately obvious (in Heavensward we very obviously had to finish off Nidhogg).
Ultimately, there are some question marks, but I’m also generally as excited as I was before; this is going to be more content in a game I enjoy playing and would enjoy playing more of no matter what, so I may be a simple mark for some of these things like the Vana’diel March but it at least tracks for me. The feature list could look bulkier, absolutely, but I also hope there are a few quality of life elements that just haven’t been discussed yet. Like, if I can explore the game’s recreation of the FFXI maps in Explorer Mode or something similar? I would be endlessly happy. Really.
Feedback is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, we’ll obviously be just a day out from the patch, but I’ve found that my usual “patch note reactions” columns just don’t have as much to react to. So barring something really unusual, I’m going to do something very different and talk about things that I would love to get from FFXIV but which I don’t expect to ever get for very good reasons. And no, they’re not balance reasons.
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.
