So to preface this particular column, I want to make something clear: There’s no conspiracy going on with Final Fantasy XIV’s patch 7.1. I did a whole column about how the patch was in no way missing on things that were promised or planned, and I stand by that. Rather, this is more about the fact that this patch has definitely seen its content spread out over a longer period of time.
Now, calling it an “experiment” (as I did last week) is highly speculative on my part because at no point was this framed by Square Enix as experimental. But it is kind of the one thing that is actually a bit unusual about an x.1 patch compared to the game’s existing history. So let’s talk about spreading things out, whether or not it worked here, and perhaps most importantly whether or not that provides useful data for the game as a whole or for 7.1 in particular. Yes, I’ll explain.
While FFXIV has built up a reputation for having pretty meaty patches that contain plenty of content, one of the things that tends to get… not missed but possibly sidelined is the fact that most of those patches have their content very much up front and immediately accessible. I have taken many a day off to just dive into the patch in question, and while that’s fun, it also speaks to the fact that once you’re done with the patch content, you are… done. It is done until the next patch; that’s all she wrote. Acceptable, not bad by any means, but also perhaps faster than you might think.
That’s not to say that you’re done with everything, of course; there’s always repeated content built in. But you do find yourself with the majority of the one-time content done pretty quickly, and from there it turns into a routine and potentially steady unlocks for allied societies and the like.
Not that this is a bad thing, but I can definitely understand the idea behind spreading this content out a little bit. It means that instead of having one day when you mainline the game and then settle into slow progress, you have that come out in dribs and drabs, and theoretically it extends the life of the content.
Only… does it?
When I talked about patch 7.15 back after it came out, one of the things I noted was that the patch was basically all one-off quests rather than having anything substantial. It’s not that the quests were bad (even the worst one was mostly just there, not really bad), but they were just quests. You get them done in an hour or so at most. I enjoyed them and had fun with them, but they are not something I am going to spend the next couple of weeks doing because of course I’m not; that’s just not a thing and was never going to be a thing.
The problem of spreading things out is that sometimes there just is not that much content to spread out in the first place. You can subdivide a patch to a pretty significant degree, sure, but no matter how you slice it a single quest is not a week of content. Neither are two quests or three or… you get the idea.
So at face value it feels like splitting things up further was not really a net positive. It meant that instead of getting one bulky patch we got a long, slow trail of a single patch. And while I can’t say that this was definitely an experiment, I would say that in this case it definitely did not work. But I think it’s also worth considering that as I pointed out, the x.1 patch for the game is usually lighter in terms of content. It is, in some ways, the wrap-up-the-expansion patch, not in terms of basic features but in terms of the stuff that needs to get out the door first like the crafting and combat role wrap-up, the start of other ongoing stories, and so forth.
We generally do not get much content out of the first patch beyond a new dungeon and the new alliance raid. This has long been the case. It isn’t a failure as far as I’m concerned, but it is a bit of an odd situation for something to try to space out. There’s not much to it, so drawing it out more just highlights how we don’t get much more new stuff in this patch to begin with.
The reason that I think it’s important to note that I have nothing but speculation about this even being an experiment is that for all I know, spreading things out was not a goal that the team was pursuing but just a thing that happened as a result of other events. Maybe it was more about the timing so close to the winter holiday, which is a smaller deal in Japan but still a bit of a deal. Maybe this was just how the development timing shook out. Who knows?
I suspect that if 7.15 had contained new Blue Mage content or Beastmaster or the like (which, to be fair, was never actually on the table), it’d make the calculus feel a little different. A new Ultimate and the Chaotic Cloud of Darkness are both content that a fair slice of the playerbase may not engage with. That’s an argument you can make about pretty much anything in the game, sure, but it hits different when you’re discussing high-end progression content rather than content meant to be accessible to everyone.
If this was an experiment, it was a bad one not because of the results but because the results are by their nature skewed. It’s hard to tell whether this is a better way to pace four months of content when the first patch never really quite has that much stuffed into it; instead it just feels spaced out. And if it wasn’t an experiment, it sure was an odd set of decisions when having a week between 7.15 and Chaotic being added was in some way necessary to catch up with gear or preparation. It’s just a lag time for the sake of lag time.
My roommate in college, for many years, had a quote from Charles Babbage as his email signature because he liked it. It’s apropos here.
On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], “Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?” I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
In other words, the worst results come from bad data going in to the experiment making the results wrong from first principles. If you have the wrong figures, you’re only going to get wrong answers.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, we’re going to discuss something that’s much more focused on fictional analysis than anything gameplay related, and it’s a pretty basic one: Why doesn’t Batman the Warrior of Light not simply kill the Joker Zoraal Ja?
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.
