In the run-up to Shadowbringers, we learned that Final Fantasy XIV was not going to be doing Hard dungeons any longer. The reason given was pretty straightforward and reasonable in that the developers wanted to allocate the resources that would otherwise go to those dungeons into other areas. It’s definitely a reasonable principle to operate on. The fact of the matter is that development on any MMORPG involves making choices about what you’re going to include and what you’re going to exclude. Every thing you make is a choice to not make other things.
I had words about this back when it was first announced, and I’ve brought up the changes on a couple of occasions, but I’ve never really made a big point of it. I wanted to see how things played out over a longer period of time. So now we’re into the third expansion after that change has been made. Let’s look at what has been done with the added development resources and ask the question of whether or not the change has been, y’know… a good thing?
First of all, it’s important to understand that as I say this I am explicitly playing around with the fact that we cannot ever actually know the full measure of the difference between what would have been added with or without the development resources of Hard mode dungeons. Time is rarely so fungible as to easily map a one-to-one exchange of value. So right from the start, this is an exercise in pure, unalloyed speculation.
More importantly, since the removal of Hard dungeons, Square has certainly released some new content that I consider to be of dubious net worth to the game as a whole. But if we saw these things releasing before they were excised, then it’s not fair to treat them as extra additions. For example, would I rather have Hard dungeons or Ultimates? Obviously the answer is the former for many reasons, but Ultimates started being rolled out in Stormblood. Ditto Eureka, so field operations aren’t really replacing anything.
So, then. What extra stuff have we actually gotten?
The funny thing is that when you make those your operating principles, the answer is actually “not a whole heck of a lot.” Obviously, Variant/Criterion dungeons have entirely been added since the change. The same goes for Unreal trials, although those seem as if they cannot require quite the same level of tuning; they’re mostly just rebalancing existing Extreme trials to be level-appropriate, along with some mechanical changes where needed. We had the extra Memoria Miseria trial against Varis, and maybe you could argue the Asura fight (although I would disagree with that because we’ve had new trials in Hildibrand quests before).
Add in the new Chaotic Cloud of Darkness fight and… wow. That is not much, is it? Spread over two expansions, this is functionally nothing compared to getting a few Hard dungeons. More importantly, it’s all content aimed at a very different audience than the Hard dungeon experience traditionally was; instead of being general midcore content, it’s either high-end content or solo-based story stuff. (I like plotting variant dungeons, sure, but they can be done solo and we all know it.)
Here we come into one of the main issues overall with the change. It’s not so much that the content is greatly lessened; remember, Stormblood had only two Hard dungeons, so that’s not a major discrepancy or a huge loss of content. Rather, it’s that content enjoyed and explored by a good chunk of the playerbase is a bit more marginalized compared to the higher-end playerbase. Not abandoned by any means, but there’s definitely a tilt here.
Of course, there are other elements at play here that we ought to consider. For example, we don’t know how much extra time can be devoted to making dungeons play better when the team doesn’t have to split its attention, and I think the Strayborough Dreadwalk is the first time in a long while that we’ve had an Expert dungeon that’s just plain bad. Equally relevant is the fact that moving away from Hard dungeons has created a different incentive for designers to plan dungeons for one use instead of two.
That probably seems kind of irrelevant, and to an extent it is, but I’ve talked before about how some story dungeons make little to no sense for characters to theoretically revisit. Many are outright impossible. Hero’s Gauntlet isn’t a “dungeon” in the sense that it is a single structure; it’s a running combat encounter presented as a dungeon. And it’s cool in that regard, but trying to set it up as a dungeon map meant to be re-explored removes some of that cool right away.
But still… even taking that into account, I look at the trade that we’ve gotten and it’s not a great trade up until this point. If you asked me if I would trade all that stuff for two new dungeons in Expert roulettes during Shadowbringers and Endwalker, the answer would be yes. Unreservedly.
Whether or not I figure those are good trades is, to a certain degree, irrelevant. No one is actually asking me. The FFXIV development team does not answer to me, they answer to Naoki Yoshida, and he already made his decision here. Based on the steps I already outlined here, I can even understand why that decision was made. Nor does it seem likely that the course is going to be reversed any time soon, especially since this expansion will once again feature a set of Variant and Criterion dungeons (although we haven’t yet heard anything about them, which is… not encouraging, I think, in hoping that they are overall better than the prior dungeons).
That having been said, I also think it’s just good form and a good idea to wait until you see how these various changes play out before drawing final conclusions about good or bad ideas. So I’ve been sitting on it for a couple years now, waiting to see how things worked, and I wanted to especially give Chaotic difficulty a chance because up until it was actually live it’d be silly to prematurely be mad about more content.
Now it is live. It’s all live, as a point of fact. And I can understand why this set of content would be more appealing for developers than doing more Hard dungeons, how it could be more helpful for scenario planning, and so forth. But I don’t believe the change has played out very well on the ground level. We’ve seen what extra stuff is coming now. I don’t think it’s worth it. I think I liked it better the old way.
Feedback, as always, is welcome via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com or in the comments down below. I also feel like this touches off an interesting discussion about how long you should let development changes linger before trying to evaluate them, but that’s a discussion for a different column, so expect that later this week. In this column next week, I’m going to actually make a really weird draw and compare how FFXIV is starting to have an interesting parallel to another long-running MMORPG… namely, Star Trek Online.
What did you think I was going to say?
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.
