As we've discussed quite a bit on this very site, Final Fantasy 14 is in a weird spot with its content—a sluggish patch cycle has paired terribly with a somewhat scattershot design philosophy that's left casual-to-midcore players feeling underwhelmed, and hardcore players with precious little to do in between raids.
This came to a head in the Forked Tower—to cut a long complaint short, the Forked Tower was a raid plonked at the tail-end of the Occult Crescent, a kind of open-world content designed primarily for casual-to-midcore players to have something to grind away at. Only, the Forked Tower was an absolute nightmare to get into, requiring a fatal mix of cooperation, mechanical perfection, and the stars aligning.
In many ways, it was kinda a raid for no-one—hard enough to put your average joe off, but too difficult to join as an organised group. While director Naoki Yoshida (Yoshi-P) and co. are making changes to it, which have been further announced in today's Live Letter, there's also been another promising sign that the MMO is slowly, but surely on the mend.
The game's new deep dungeon, Pilgrim's Traverse, was announced—with the bold statement that it's a "deep dungeon for everyone! … whether you're more casual or hardcore, whether you fly solo or run with a fixed party, Pilgrim's Traverse has something for everyone to enjoy".
Yoshi-P then went on to say (thanks to the Final Fantasy XIV Discord for the fan translation) that this philosophy was a response to feedback—essentially, FF14's added casual content to the odd patches, and hardcore to the even patches. However, while the game might have "so much content in FF right now, for someone who doesn't do savage, an even patch might bring zero content.
"When we're adding 10 sorts of new content, hardcore players might enjoy three of them, casual players might enjoy three, allrounders maybe four to six. It's rare to have someone who enjoys all 10. A design philosophy change I want to get into is to show how there are different ways to enjoy the same content, in a casual way or in a more hardcore way."
What follows is a Deep Dungeon that basically uses the whole chocobo—making sure Square isn't simply wasting the asset and design work that went into it by gating it behind difficulty or organisation, while still adding harder versions for the sweats. Here's a quick-fire list of changes:
- While other Deep Dungeons locked off later floors to "fixed" (or premade) parties, every floor of the Pilgrim's Traverse can now be attempted by matchmade groups.
- In general, the difficulty should be more evenly spread out between the floors, with less early spikes.
- The Deep Dungeon will have two new "checkpoints" you can start from—floors 51 and 71, in addition to the traditional floor 31 checkpoint.
What's more, you can now challenge the final boss of the Deep Dungeon any time you like with its own separate duty—"It does not count as reaching floor 100, but it allows you to practice the last boss and re-entering at 71," Yoshi-P explains.
For hardcore players, however, there'll be a version of the boss fight dubbed "The Final Verse (Quantum)". This seems a little similar to WoW's Mythic+, in that you'll be able to scale the battle's difficulty via "offerings"—a minimum of 15, up to 40. This won't just change stats, but also mechanics: "With 40 offerings, this is more difficult than the 4th floor of a savage fight."
All in all, Yoshi-P says the team is "trying to improve the possibilities for the different play styles of our players. If we add 10 content [types], I hope players can find seven things to do."
We'll need to see this play out in practice, but I, for one, am downright feeling optimistic. For the longest time, FF14's problem has been catering unevenly to its playerbase—leaving some overfed and others starved. I might be giving gold stars for basic, modern MMO design, but as the saying goes, the best time to make broadly accessible, but scaling content was 10 years ago. The next best time is today.
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