Tomorrow’s patch will mark the latest in the long line of custom delivery clients in Final Fantasy XIV, but oddly enough I don’t think I’ve ever really talked much about the content beyond each individual client as the list has grown. This is a bit odd, since the content has been getting steadily added to the game ever since Heavensward, but it also makes a bit of sense since custom deliveries are also very deliberately lightweight content.
And yet they’re also vital content in the ecosystem of crafting, side stories, and as part of a larger development of the game’s crafting ecosystem over the course of the past decade or so. It’s all worth examining, and so I’m going to go ahead and turn the clock back before we had any custom delivery clients and before the ecosystem was even in place for them. In fact, we’re going to turn the clock all the way back to the 2.x series. Strap in. This is a walk.
It’s easy to kind of lose sight of this fact because at this point the game’s design is such a well-oiled machine, but the entirety of A Realm Reborn was very much spent making the PvE endgame setup work at all. Lots of things that feel like a given now – Expert roulette, the process of upgrading items, and the reasons and rewards for doing each new alliance raid – were not really firmly in place until the end of 2.5. And even that’s not totally right, since some of the systems wouldn’t really be finalized until Heavensward.
On the crafting side, though, things were worse. Significantly worse, actually.
The developers knew some of what they wanted endgame crafting to look like, but the fact of the matter is that not only did A Realm Reborn feature a whole lot of iterations of reward structures, but most of them weren’t actually lined up with what the developers were happy with. It’s why the early Master Recipe books are locked behind some weird gates instead of the very specific structure we see now, and there was a lot of very obvious back-and-forth about how to reward new crafting players, how players were supposed to improve crafting gear, and so forth.
This was especially a problem because obviously PvE content was going to keep getting harder, but crafting didn’t really have an answer for an ever-ongoing system. So when Heavensward introduced scrips, it was an attempt to solve the problem. And… it still didn’t totally work.
In broad strokes, crafting and gathering scrips obviously worked; they were functionally akin to tomestones for crafters and gatherers. But they still hadn’t really locked into their final form, and part of the problem for the devs was how to make the materials gated behind these scrips valuable on a continual basis while also making the content accessible. And this tied into another problem: Crafters and gatherers needed more repeatable content, not just crafting things to spam on the market board.
So what do you do? Well, a number of things, but one of the big changes was the addition of custom delivery clients. Yes, more than 500 words in, we’re finally on to the content we started talking about!
Since crafting isn’t really the sort of content best gated by weekly caps, the idea was clearly that custom delivery clients would provide weekly deliveries that provided scrips in exchange for turn-ins, but only so many every week. That let more casual crafters or gatherers have a weekly cap sort of, but it also meant that more dedicated players could farm faster. And it provided another means for crafters and gatherers to level other than leves (which at the time hadn’t pivoted to just being for crafting and gathering), so that didn’t hurt.
Of course, the flip side was that the developers learned there were still holes in the design, chiefly the fact that there weren’t a lot of rewards on the far side of maxing out a client especially when each client only had a chance to request the most rewarding turn-ins. Hence additions like being able to play dress-up with the client, getting outfits and mounts of your own, and so forth. It’s taken a little time, but at this point we have a robust list of delivery clients and 12 deliveries to unload between them every week, as well as being sure that you’ll always have at least 12 possible options for the maximum rewards.
It’s a good idea. So what doesn’t quite work right?
The biggest issue that the content has is that the limit of 12 weekly turn-ins has been in place for a long time now, which is a bit of a drag when that client list just keeps growing. You still get an advantage for having a full list, of course – it lets you make sure you can maximize your rewards each week – but it feels a little annoying to have so many options and always having to just choose two, especially when you have to pick and choose between crafting and gathering.
Obviously, having some sort of cap in place there is a good thing, but it’d be nice if you had slightly more options for what you’ll pick and at least not feel as if you’re quite so restrained for crafting vs. gathering. Maybe having a separate cap for the two kinds of turn-in would be nice, especially since there’s already a limit on how many turn-ins are available for each client in a given week.
Beyond that, it’d be nice if you ever had any reason to deliver to someone who isn’t offering a top-shelf reward on a given week. That’s a pretty minor quibble, of course. There’s nothing stopping you; it’s just inevitably the wrong call.
And all of that is pretty secondary because at the end of the day, custom deliveries just quietly and unobtrusively work. They’re content that doesn’t require too much mental load from players, they’re not always the most engaging things to do but also go quickly, and they give us another way to explore side stories that would otherwise be easily forgotten about or actively avoided. That’s all good, and the diversity of clients means that we can explore some odd corners that otherwise would get lost in the shuffle.
I’m always happy to get a new delivery client, not just for something new to do for a few weeks but because it means that we’re exploring something in a manner that doesn’t involve killing stuff. That’s one of the fun parts of the game in general, and while we also get that from our non-combat allied societies, custom deliveries are a more consistent way to do so. While the content isn’t quite perfect and can be easily cleared every week, it’s a great way to keep people engaged in crafting even if they’re not into playing the markets.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I am of course going to be talking about this week’s patch… but since basically all of the content is focused on storyline, it’s going to have some spoiler-adjacent stuff in there inevitably. Be fairly warned ahead of time.
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.
