1599: Through the Maelstrom Again

Final Fantasy XIV patch day! If you don’t play an MMO, it’s probably difficult for you to understand why people get excited about patches, but we really do.

The reason for this is that, more so than any other type of game out there, MMO patches can considerably improve the experience of the game for everyone playing as well as adding new content to enjoy. And Final Fantasy XIV has definitely been delivering on that front since it launched.

Since launch, the game has, so far, enjoyed two major content patches and a few smaller patches along the way. These smaller ones are arguably the most interesting ones in many ways, because they tend to be the ones that improve the players’ “quality of life” in various ways — perhaps through interface refinements, perhaps through balancing tweaks, perhaps through adjustments to the way the game works based on the community’s feedback.

So far, we’ve seen all of the above. We’ve seen the easy to miss red targeting markers for enemy attacks replaced with more brightly coloured, pulsing markers. We’ve seen the addition of the Challenge and Sightseeing logs to give people more things to do and ways to earn rewards. We’ve seen adjustments to the endgame currencies as the average “item level” of endgame players gradually increases. And we’ve seen much-appreciated little usability tweaks, like the fact you can now get off a chocobo you’re riding by pressing the shoulder buttons on your controller rather than having to twat about with hotbars and icons.

The game is still recognisable as what it was when it launched — it was already a solid game then, after all — but the refinements it has enjoyed ever since mean that it has been consistently, constantly improving — and, more importantly, it’s proof that the development team is both willing to listen to players and implement some of their best ideas.

The game is going from strength to strength, in other words. And they said subscription-based MMOs were dead.