2105: Into Darkness

The official trailer for Final Fantasy XIV patch 3.1 came out recently, and it’s looking simply marvellous. I am happy about this, because although I feel like I’ve got over my “rut” with the game, I’d still love to see something new at last. It’s been a long time coming, after all.

My initial reaction to the announcement of 3.1 was slight disappointment, but in retrospect this was rather silly. I’ll tell you my thinking, though: previous content patches for the game tended to include three new dungeons, a new raid (either a 24-player casual raid of the Crystal Tower ilk, or an 8-player hardcore raid of the Coil ilk) and maybe some new quests and minor mechanics here and there. And gear, of course. 3.1, meanwhile, only includes two new dungeons, one of which is a “Hard Mode” version of an existing dungeon — Pharos Sirius — which immediately made me feel a bit let down that we weren’t getting as much new stuff as we had in the past.

But then I considered things a bit more, and there are plenty of interesting things happening outside the dungeons, because dungeons aren’t the only interesting thing you can do in the game. They’re cool, sure, but I get the impression that Yoshi-P and the FFXIV team very much want to try and shake up the basic formula of the game a little bit having got it where they want to be over the course of A Realm Reborn and vanilla Heavensward. In other words, that means getting people out of the “grind the same thing over and over” mentality and into doing more varied things.

Perhaps the thing I’m most intrigued by — and most mystified by — is the new Exploratory Missions system, whereby individual players, parties, alliances and Free Companies can fly off into the Sea of Clouds with their airship(s), explore a region for 90 minutes, kick the shit out of some monsters, find treasure, complete objectives and gather stuff. This has the most potential to shake up the basic structure of the game, and I really hope it turns out well.

Details are still a bit thin on the ground as yet, but it seems like there will be three difficulty levels for these exploratory missions, with the hardest level being pitched towards Free Companies with their own airships. Monsters will have difficulty ranks between 1 and 6 instead of conventional levels, and there are apparently Hunt-esque “marks” to defeat as well as regular monsters. There will be objectives to complete that will allow players to earn the all-important Tomestones to upgrade their equipment, and treasure chests that contain new Aetherial equipment with randomised stats.

The randomised element of the Exploratory missions is the thing I’m looking forward to the most, to be honest. Exactly how random it is I’m not entirely sure as yet, but I know at the very least there will be several different areas that you can fly to when you start one of these missions — it seems you won’t be able to explicitly pick where you want to go and will instead be assigned a random landing point in a random region. The equipment you can find will be scattered in bronze, silver and gold chests, and presumably tracking these chests down will involve actual exploration of the area rather than the current situation in dungeons, where equipment can be found in boss chests and stuff in all the other chests is fairly underwhelming in its awesomeness, usually consisting of either potions or crafting materials.

Aside from the Exploratory Missions, the thing I’m looking forward to the most is the new Minstrel’s Ballad trial, which is a considerably expanded version of the final boss fight from the Heavensward story quests. This was an absolutely spectacular fight, albeit not particularly difficult, so it will be exciting to have the opportunity to see this realised as something closer to what the creators apparently originally intended. It will be a ten-phase fight — they stopped short of going for thirteen phases to match the thirteen Knights of the Round — and will apparently be on par difficulty-wise with Extreme-level primal fights and the first area of Alexander (Savage). Hopefully this doesn’t mean it will be a glorified DPS check like Alexander is, but from the little I’ve seen of it so far, it looks like there’s going to be some interesting mechanics at play.

Anyway. Patch 3.1 is coming in early November, which isn’t far away now. I’m really looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, and actually a little bit thankful that the new Relic weapons — which are apparently known as “Anima Weapons” — aren’t coming immediately, instead inviting us to grind ourselves into oblivion from patch 3.15 onwards.

In the meantime, I’ve got Dark Knight to level 50 today, so only ten levels to go before I can officially retire Paladin for the most part and start playing a tank class with a bit more damage output at high level! Darksiiiiiiide!