One of the things I find myself coming back to a lot is how information is only as useful as your ability to digest it. This is obvious on a basic level when you think about it for a moment; you could have a page of instructions that perfectly outline everything you need to do to fix all of the problems in your life, but if it’s written in French and you can’t read a word of it, it’s not helpful to you. But it extends elsewhere, and today I’m going to be looking at that from the perspective of Final Fantasy XIV’s upcoming Fan Festival.
We’re still several weeks out from the festival at this time, but I already have a pretty clear picture of what I’ll be looking for when we get the fragmentary teases about our next expansion at the festival. (No, it hasn’t been formally announced yet, but we know.) I don’t just mean “what will Yoshida be wearing to tease about the next job,” but more subtle things. Take a trip with me – let me explain.
How cagey are the zones we’re told about?
Let’s not mince words: Every expansion since Heavensward has involved some degree of deception about our next destination. I don’t just mean insofar as we haven’t been shown the final zone of each expansion; that’s whatever. I mean that Heavensward made it clear we were going to Ishgard and the surrounding lands, and then every other expansion has had some sort of “gotcha” to it, from Shadowbringers playing a game with people assuming we were going to Garlemald and Ilsabard to Stormblood’s whole “Oops, Two Continents!” bit.
So a lot is going to depend on what we’re being told about our next destination. As I’ve mentioned before, if my predictions are entirely off and it’s going to be the Void, that’s not something that can be hidden. It’s going to be immediately obvious. The Void has a look in a way that the First didn’t, since the First still hadn’t fully succumbed. But therein lies the ambiguity.
If Yoshida starts off by showing us “we’re going to Meracydia” and shows us zones from Meracydia, including what looks like a major city, then that’s probably our sole destination. If he shows off Meracydia and a settlement, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re going there and elsewhere. And if he shows off a zone in Meracydia and then another zone elsewhere, we’re probably getting an expansion akin to Endwalker. That’s going to be on my mind as we’re looking at the first reveals.
Who’s teasing the first new job?
My predictions for the next new job, as I have mentioned previously, are a new tank and a new magic DPS. That having been said, the trailer we see in July is unlikely to feature both of them; we’ve only seen the derplander in the new job for the expansion once, and that was Stormblood. So while he will no doubt be taking on a different job, it’ll almost certainly be an existing one, and based on history it’ll probably be Gunbreaker or Reaper.
Or it’ll finally be a magic job, I suppose. That’d be a nice change.
That doesn’t mean the new job won’t be teased, though. Both Shadowbringers and Endwalker teased one of the new jobs in the partial trailer, and I don’t expect this expansion to be any different. Most likely, again, it will not be the derplander. So there’s something to be guessed at here.
First and foremost, it’s worth seeing who is using the job. If the new job is being used by Y’shtola, for example, it’s almost certainly a caster of some kind. If it’s Lyse, the new job is some kind of melee, either melee DPS or a tank. You get the idea. While characters do change their jobs with some reliability, casters stay casters and melee stays melee. (And ranged characters… rarely show up, sadly. Sorry, Hilda!)
But let’s assume that the new job is shown off by a character we don’t know yet or whose combat role is unclear. Let’s say we can tell it’s Erenville, who has been faintly teased as having a big role in the next expansion but as of yet has just been shown as a non-combat character. And let’s further say that we don’t actually see him doing much in combat, just dodging and wielding a weapon and doing something that looks like a magical attack which could really be any job. What does that tell you?
Well, a lot depends on the kind of weapon he’s wielding. A whip, for example? That’d be a hint at a magic class (whips have long been used by casters in the series). A two-handed hammer? Probably melee or a tank, but a one-handed hammer might well be a caster as well. What kind of framing does it get? Does it look like it has some sort of armor or is it mostly light cloth or leather?
This won’t necessarily tell us what the next job is. It’s enough to start shaping thinking, above and beyond the shirt Yoshida will reveal. That’s tradition now.
How much time is spent on each reveal?
Naoki Yoshida and his team are, at this point, absolute experts at the performance aspect of these reveals. They have done great work in making these reveals fun to watch and a good time all around. And they know how long it is going to take to go through each point… and the stuff being revealed does not have a bearing on how long the keynote is.
Seriously, as someone who has interviewed Yoshida multiple times, I believe with love in my heart that he could stretch “I like ham sandwiches” into an hour-long presentation if he needed to.
My point is not that these keynotes are without substance; far from it. My point is that these keynotes are planned and carefully set up so that the reveals are unfolding at the right pace to fit the allotted time. And if five minutes are spent looking at one zone, that says something different from ten minutes on one zone.
If the reveals come out fast and don’t linger on obvious stuff longer than necessary, I expect that some big twist and surprise is planned for the ending. If reveals linger on new Primals or whatever, I expect that it’s going to end in a more predictable place. That doesn’t mean that we’ll learn everything in the expansion during the first keynote; that just means that it gives a rough idea of what’s coming next.
And if we are very lucky, perhaps this expansion we will finally not have a new short and ostensibly cute race that gets tapped for the entirety of comic relief despite stretching one joke well past the breaking point. Please. I am begging. Not again. You’re not going to do a better version than the Namazu. Let it rest.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, I want to discuss the complete narrative misfire that Pandæmonium actually wound up being, even as I understand the motivation.
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.
