As I write this, I am looking forward to the Little Ladies’ Day event in Final Fantasy XIV… or more specifically, I am looking forward to the rewards from the event. I am not really looking forward to the event itself, which is probably going to be a couple of quests at most in which we meet a forgettable NPC with a trivial problem, followed almost immediately by resolving that NPC’s problem and then getting the rewards from said event. Oh well.
People have been complaining about FFXIV’s minor holiday events for ages, of course, but the thing that usually garners complaints is the fact that the events ostensibly don’t feature sufficiently desirable rewards. This is incorrect; you may not personally want the rewards, and that’s valid, but the awards have not changed in any meaningful sense over the game’s lifespan. Some of them are very elaborate, and some of them are really pointless, but most are in the middle. They run the same spectrum from outfits to emotes to mounts to pets. Same as it ever was. What is meaningfully different, however, is that the quests alone have progressively gotten… well… worse. Why is that?
Before I really dive into that, though, I want you, my theoretical reader, to think back to the FFXIV event that you think was the most fun. I’m not going to make a bet about which one it was, but I’m sure you can think of a memorable quest or two, and I think you would probably admit that mechanically, it wasn’t all that different. And you know what? That’s fair. Mechanically, these events haven’t moved much.
The thing about designing event content in any MMORPGÂ is that you don’t really want to reinvent the wheel. Nobody wants to make a minigame that is never going to be used again after a given event, and it’s not really the ideal space to introduce major new game mechanics. And considering that Square Enix wants these events to be more or less accessible to everyone, you can’t expect it to really add or massively develop new features.
I don’t think this is a bad thing, but it is a thing. It means that while you can play around with some lightly puzzle-solving elements for dungeons using existing maps, you are pretty limited… and more importantly, you are limited in a way that the rest of the game isn’t limited.
That doesn’t mean the events have to be boring, though. Aside from regular features like the haunted house or the Eorzean Ninja Warrior course, fine, you might not really be able to make a super-interesting event mechanically. Most of them are going to come down to, at best, farming a FATE or a bespoke non-combat dungeon. But you can get something interesting out of the storyline, and that’s what matters the most, right? But it also draws attention to the fact that the event stories of late have been… well… kind of meh.
For example, this year’s Valentione’s quest was in many way the apex of anodyne garbage. A botanist is sad because a girl he liked to raise roses with left. He finds out the rose was native to Coerthas, but no one in Ishgard is mad he’s raising them now, except she feels guilty. So then he tricks her into showing up again, and she finds out no one is mad, and… then that’s it. It’s the most non-stake event possible.
Why is that the case? Why are we getting such weaker stories? Why aren’t we getting bigger events like the one year when we had three different representatives arguing for their own view of how romance should work? What about back when the whole event was about Lady de Valentione finding love herself? Whatever happened to those stories?
Well… I just told you. They’re in the past. And that’s why I think the stories are getting a fair bit weaker and why I’m not sure if there’s really much to be done to fix it.
Consider that for the first couple years of the game, huge chunks of the world and the lore had yet to be fully explored. When a representative of the Far East showed up every Heavensturn, it was a distinct and exciting chance to learn more about the Far East as a whole and engage in something new. House de Valentione had valuable information about Ishgard as a society, even when we had visited the city and learned a bit about the houses. You could still have a new story about the True Meaning of Starlight.
The game has now been running for 12 years. The Rising is no longer a triumphant celebration of “holy crap, we actually made it this many years” and hasn’t been for some time. The restoration of Eorzea post-Calamity is now a very fixed thing. We have done this dance now, many a time. It is resolved. That lore is about as explored as you could expect anything to be. So what’s left to tell stories about?
In some ways, this is a weakness of the fact that the game has a bespoke event every single time the annual celebration rolls around. You are just going to run out of stories eventually. Brooklyn 99 ran for eight seasons and made eight different stories out of its annual Halloween heist, but it was starting to run thin on its material by the end and salvaged it by making it an emotional series finale. You cannot discover the True Meaning of [insert holiday] multiple years in a row, and the breadth of stories at this point has rendered the exercise pretty well covered.
Can this really be fixed? Well… no, not necessarily. Final Fantasy XI just turns on all the old standby parts of the event every year, which is nice if you don’t have stuff from prior runs but makes it completely pointless if you do. “New stories each time” is the tack this team has chosen, and so we’re kinda stuck with events that don’t really have much new ground to cover any more but need to keep running in some capacity.
That doesn’t mean that I’m exactly thrilled about the fact that the event stories have gotten weaker over the past few years. I would much prefer that they were, in fact, good and fun and exciting, even. But I’m not altogether sure that this is a problem that can be fixed at this point. Maybe a couple more years will help change that, maybe the arc of things has just stuck us in a less interesting state of affairs. At least the rewards are usually fun enough.
Feedback, as usual, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to go in a wildly different direction with a couple of complete crackpot theories regarding story direction that I don’t think are correct, but are just plausible enough that they might play out.
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.
