It is a fact almost universally acknowledged that human beings are never happy with where they are currently located; instead, we almost constantly wish to be where we are not. If you are getting in the car to go to a fast food restaurant, you want to be already there. When you are there, you want to be home. When you get back home, you want to be in a bouncy castle. This is almost how it feels writing about the Occult Crescent in Final Fantasy XIV this week, except not quite because I won’t actually be doing the Cosmic Exploration content until after this column is published! Because the column is on Monday and the patch is on Tuesday. You get it.
Regardless, I am thinking about the Occult Crescent, and while I am pretty sure that it’s going to be an improvement on the Bozjan content (because that was itself an improvement on Eureka, this is the arc the team follows), I still have some things that I am already considering. So let’s talk about that ahead of the actual implementation.
A reason for enemies outside of items
For all the things that Eureka did wrong, one thing it definitely did right was make sure that the random enemies roaming the zones were actually useful and important. Sure, in initial balance that was clearly targeted toward forcing people to find camp locations and treat battles more akin to Final Fantasy XI leveling, but it also meant that the zones are both still accessible and possible to engage with now after balance changes and that you can generally make progress without having to sit around waiting for FATEs to spawn.
Yes, I know that they’re technically not FATEs in Bozja. They walk like ducks and quack like ducks.
It’s not that the enemies did nothing in the Bozjan zones, but they just dropped items and that kinda limited the appeal and, frankly, the fun of these zones after the crowds move on. I realize that a certain amount of dynamic engagements (read: a bunch of specific enemies you spam AoEs on) are just what we’re going to get, but having enemies be something you don’t just roll your eyes at and actually have a reason to fight and deal with is generally a good idea.
We already know that leveling up phantom jobs is going to be a thing in the zones along with your overall knowledge level, and I’m hopeful that this is a big part of the reason for having two separate leveling systems; if you can level phantom jobs from both enemies and dynamic engagements but knowledge level only from dynamic engagements (or vice versa), it ensures that random enemies are still worth fighting and chaining together even if you can’t ignore the other content.
Better lockbox balance
While I am not a huge fan of the randomized lockboxes as a means of distributing rewards, I am also aware that this is an element of the gameplay that is unlikely to go away since it has remained consistent. And it makes sense because this is also a form of long-term engagement with the game; you have a reason to keep playing the content for another shot at the minions or mounts or cosmetic gear you want. The problem, at least to me, is that a lot of this is available only by rolling the dice repeatedly.
The Bozjan lockboxes did significantly change how these worked compared to Eureka; there were far fewer lockbox-exclusive items, which helped, and there was currency to purchase things like gear sets. This is good. But the flip side is that the fundamental problem wherein the boxes were still random remained in place. It was still, ultimately, a random rolling sequence. There was no mechanism in place whereby it was ever assured that you would get a thing you wanted.
To me, the simplest solution is one that might be technically difficult to implement but would solve the problem. Have the lockboxes give you a choice between an item or an amount of currency that can only be obtained by opening them. That currency is not equal to the cost of an item, but it also means that if you keep opening boxes without getting something you want, you have options. But you still need to open them in order to get the currency at all.
As mentioned, this might not be all that technically feasible; I would believe if instead we had to just have lockboxes provide a small amount of currency that you can only get from the boxes alongside their usual rewards, or even just some “hard” form of luck protection. But the point remains the same. You should never feel like you’re forever chasing one reward if you keep piling up those boxes.
Solid reasons to return
Yes, this is a drum I keep beating, and there is a good reason for that. This is really important! And it’s especially important when what we know thus far is that 7.3 will contain a Deep Dungeon, 7.4 will add more Phantom Jobs, and 7.5 will add a new zone to the area. In other words, the Occult Crescent is – as far as we know – the only region we’ll be exploring here for the next two patches.
Is that unusual? Not inherently; Bozja, again, followed the same basic structure. We got something different in 5.4. But what is unusual is that the Bozjan Southern Front was added in 5.3, not 5.2. What we’ve been told so far means that there is a gap there in terms of content for leveling up your relic weapons, and even if we do get something more to do in 7.4, that still leaves 7.3 as something of a question mark.
Obviously, I am not going to pre-emptively have anything to critique about how Phantom Weapons (which are supposedly the name for the new relics) are divided up since they, y’know, aren’t here yet. Heck, even the patch preview didn’t go into detail on the process; I think that the Resistance Weapons were a bit too quick to make the Bozjan content the worse way to farm for materials and I hope that this isn’t the case this time around, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But we as players are going to need reasons to keep going back. No matter how much you might like certain content, you do eventually get all the rewards from it.
Now, on this I have fewer great suggestions about how to accomplish this goal compared to the first two. But I also feel like this is something the team has been working on for both this style of content as well as Variant Dungeons basically since the expansion content plans were finalized. I’m not certain, but I do expect that.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, obviously I am going to be talking about the first week of Cosmic Exploration – how the content feels, what I think about it, whether or not I am still just as tired of rabbits on the moon, and so forth. Hope to see y’all there.
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.
