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The first Final Fantasy 14 Fan Festival for the MMO's next expansion kicks off today. We should be getting a little glimpse at a trailer, the expansion's name, and more than likely producer Naoki Yoshida's usual mind games with a t-shirt that'll give some sort of hint about one of the new jobs.
But first, we still have a whole other patch for Dawntrail to get to first. Patch 7.5 is set to drop on April 28, and as usual we've been handed some preliminary patch notes to comb through in anticipation.
My verdict? There's some ridiculously good quality-of-life changes here. The biggest ones were already revealed in previous livestreams: player housing is getting a furniture limit increase for both indoor and outdoor furnishings, and a whole bunch of dyes are being consolidated so they stop constantly clogging up your inventory.
Article continues belowHousing is still far from perfect, mind. It's still not instanced, and certain items might get culled if a house is full of folks and furni—which potentially scuppers methods a lot of FF14 house designers use like clipping furniture through two storeys to change its function or appearance. But an overall increase is a net positive, and the poor patch of my small house's front garden that's been negleted due to the 20-item limit will no doubt be happy to finally receive some attention.
The same can be said for the dye consolidation. They're all still single use and the premium ones you can purchase with real money are still unconsolidated. Gotta sell those Pure White and Jet Black dyes in the cash shop somehow. But the rest are split into three categories, which is infinitely more manageable for my inventory and retainers than the 100+ dyes we have right now.
Some of the QoL changes are new knowledge to me, though. One of the neatest is the fact that you can finally share hotbars across characters. It's something that might not feel entirely necesary—after all, it's an MMO that prides itself on being able to do everything on one character—but as someone who recently made an alt, it was super frustrating not being able to port over my main's hotbars and UI with the click of a button.
Technically it's still not a click, it's multiple clicks. And a 16-digit share code. It feels a little archaic of the Nintendo variety, but the process does seem to open up the possibility of sharing hotbars and HUD layouts between friends, which will be an incredibly neat use. Especially as someone who has seen some of my friend's hotbar layouts. Please let me fix them now, buds.
Not every change has me jumping for joy, though. I'm admittedly a rather casual PvPer, but the Frontline changes have me raising my eyebrow. Battle High—the thing you accrue through kills and assists, with five ranks that grant you increasing buffs as a reward—no longer deteriorates when you get killed.
You'll also earn a lot more Battle High the further up you go. It feels like a bizarre change that takes a huge part of Frontline's dynamic away—maintaining Battle High is half the fun, and I'm not sure if these changes will actually fix any of the stomping issues the huge 72-player mode currently faces.
There's loads more stuff, including:
- New chocobo interactions, like having them react to pets
- A new 24-player alliance raid
- Bonus Second Chance points on select Wondrous Tails entries
- A new message telling you which emote to use or what weather is required for some of A Realm Reborn's fussier Sightseeing Log entries
- More hats for Viera (a lot of the metal helmets we were missing in the first update)
- Changes to party KOs in deep dungeons
- Loads more gear getting two dye channels
There'll no doubt be more revealed across this weekend's Fan Fest. I hope this sea of QoL changes is the sign of something good. Even if they're not completely perfect, they're a start. And when you've got over a decade of spaghetti code to untangle, better to do it bit by bit.
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