I find myself of two minds as I play through the first part of Final Fantasy XIV‘s Cosmic Exploration. The first mind – the more positive mind – is noting how in every way, shape, and form, this content is a notable improvement on the Ishgardian Restoration that it was clearly inspired by. It addresses almost every single complaint I could have had about that particular content and adds in a lot besides, and I think all of that is good. These are good things. I am glad that the improvements were made!
And then I look at the people complaining about how it has rolled out, and I just find myself thinking, “Really? Did you all forget when we did this the last time?”
I realize that this probably comes off as if I am an old man who has noticed a cloud and is now yelling at it, but I want to both talk about the ways that the system has been improved and point out that most of the substantive critiques of the system come across as… well, critiques about the thing that we already knew was going to happen the second it was announced. So let’s talk about all of it.
First of all, let’s talk about the obvious improvements that have been made. The first and most obvious improvement is the simple reality that the developers have clearly leaned in hard on eschewing “just make Expert crafts” as the solution for challenge. Instead, the recipes we’re making have wildly different requirements in terms of quality, progress, and durability. There are Expert crafts in there, but they are not only not the only difficulty setting, they are arguably not the main one. These crafts are tricky in the best ways.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t macro them; rather, it means that trying to macro all of them is difficult-to-impossible, and while there are workaround out there almost all of those workarounds require more brainpower. Even more importantly, the way that data are collected for tools encourages you to do multiple different crafts. You cannot make all of the progress you need without doing more than one craft, and since your options are randomized, you couldn’t chain the same thing anyhow.
Even more helpfully, the crafting here does not require going out to gather materials or even dipping into your crystal store. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying these would be good things in basically any other context, up to and including monkeying with difficulty. Your average person producing the newest DPS food for a given tier wants consistency, and that means being able to expect reliable quality standards. This is… good, in fact. But the content that we are getting here, for this experience, is best served by just picking a mission and then getting into the weeds of crafting.
There’s more good stuff going on, though. By changing the mech ops to functionally be akin to the stage-defining FATEs that worked through Ishgard Restoration, it moves the burden of even seeing the content off of being available at very specific times. The red alerts give a nice chance to mix up your routine, as well, and it means on a whole that you are given plenty to do as you grind without being stuck permanently just grinding away with no changes.
I do feel like the random draws are… a little worse this time around? Not worlds worse, and I also accept that some of it may just be a combination of my ever-atrocious luck with the relative novelty of the content. It feels like there are more desirable items and worse odds of getting them, and I’m not thrilled with the overall ratio of that, but I’m also just generally a Random Reward Disliker, so you would be justified in calling that a me problem. I’ll take it on the chin.
And I am not happy that we do have a ranking website. It’s buried, but we do have one on the site. The lack of that was, honestly, an improvement over Ishgardian Restoration, so I don’t love that it’s out in the wild. This is not content that really needs a competitive side to it. That competitive side is obviously much lighter here, I am glad that we’re not grinding for Saint of Lunar Restoration or anything similar. But even the traces of it do not spark joy.
However… there are a fair number of people who are also surprised and miffed that this content being undertaken by the whole server has resulted in servers bum-rushing the content and being done with it pronto. To which I can only stare in confusion and wonder what in the heck anyone expected to have happen. Did you forget the last time we did this? Because Ishgardian Restoration was not that long ago.
I do understand not wanting to miss out on seeing all of this because you have to go to work. But this is also just the natural consequence of not having solo instances akin to Island Sanctuary. The whole point of Island Sanctuary was giving players the feeling of having a slowly developing landscape that was under your direct control, and that resulted in people getting annoyed that it was content that involved being off on your own private island without people around you.
You can tweak the numbers on how fast these phases get cleared, yes. You can make things faster or slower, but you are always going to run into the fundamental problem that this is not going to arrive on everyone’s schedule. Community efforts mean that sometimes the people who can no-life this are going to be the ones who get to see all of the things as they happen, same as it ever was.
And to be clear, I am also saying this as someone who has not been there for every single milestone as it has been hit for my server. I’ve been having a rough time, as I’ve said to many people, and I was not up for the start of the content. When I first got to the moon, it had already hit its milestones on the first day. Was that a little disappointing? Eh, sure, but for the most part I was there for the content. Not getting to automatically be a part of all of it is a touch disappointing, but it also isn’t why I’m there; I want to make my tools and enjoy the crafting that goes on around them.
I definitely do think this is an improvement from how things were before. Is it going to continue to be an improvement as we move forward? I don’t know. But it’s a good foundation for community crafting, and I’m looking forward to still progressing my cosmic tools along the way. Even if they can be a bit slow sometimes.
Feedback, as always, is welcome via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com or in the comments down below. Next week, I want to talk about something that is sitting in the back of my mind, probably unnecessarily, but just an odd gap that I can’t help but fixing my eyes upon every time I look at the horizon. We’ll get to it.
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.
