2123: Duty Complete: 24 Hours in Eorzea

Well, I’m all done! I have indeed played Final Fantasy XIV for 24 hours. Ish. (The game went down for maintenance between 7 and 11 this morning, so I must confess I snatched a quick nap, then was back on until 24 hours after I originally started.) In total at the time of writing I raised $280, which was well over my initial goal of $100, so I’m very pleased with that. A big thank you to everyone who watched my stream, and an even bigger thank you to those who dug deep and flung some cash at Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals in appreciation of my efforts. You can find my archives here, and if you want to make a last-minute donation, you can do so here.

It’s been a lot of fun! Spending such a protracted amount of time with the game has meant I’ve been able to plough through a bunch of interesting things, most notably the new Lord of Verminion minigame, which actually turned out to be surprisingly great.

Part of my reason for wanting to spend so long playing nothing but FFXIV was to check out all the new stuff in version 3.1 that launched on Tuesday, so I thought I’d spend today’s post pondering my thoughts on the things that spring immediately to mind.

The Diadem

The Exploratory Missions to The Diadem were one of the things I was most interested about in the update, and they seem to be an interesting affair, to be sure, and absolutely unlike anything else in the rest of the game. Whereas most of the group content in the game is strictly linear — even boss fights follow strict phase-based progressions and “dance steps” to learn — The Diadem is a much more freeform experience, somewhat akin to exploring out in the open world, with the notable difference that everything in The Diadem both wants to and is absolutely, positively able to kill you, even if you’re well geared. (This is a common criticism of Final Fantasy XIV and many MMOs in general; once you reach a certain level of power, monsters out in the open world simply cease to be threatening in the slightest.)

There are a number of ways you can tackle The Diadem. The optimal way to do so is to form a 24-player alliance of three 8-player parties with your Free Company and take your own airships. While The Diadem allows a maximum of 72 players in the zone in total, entering as a full alliance allows you a certain amount of control and influence over what goes on in there rather than having to contend with clashing egos and people trying to give orders in /shout.

Execution-wise, of all things, The Diadem feels a bit like Diablo meets Final Fantasy XIV. You explore, you beat up monsters, most of them drop Stuff, some of which is useful and others of which is little more than fodder to exchange for tokens (which can subsequently be exchanged for better stuff) and you repeat the process until you’re either bored or your allotted 90 minutes is up. There are clearly a bunch of hidden mechanics that people haven’t quite figured out just yet, most notably with regard to the spawning of “Notorious Monsters”, extremely powerful monsters that most likely require the cooperation of all 72 players in the area to take down. For now, the assumption seems to be that killing stuff as quickly as possible hastens the spawn of NMs, so once all the parties have completed their three objectives to get their 40 Allagan Tomestones of Esoterics, attention tends to turn to efficient killing.

The Notorious Monsters themselves — and indeed the monsters you fight around the zone — are pretty cool, as many of them make use of mechanics usually only seen in boss fights in dungeons. While some can be pretty much brute-forced with a simple tank-and-spank approach, the tougher opponents require dodging and careful use of all your abilities to defeat. They also usually drop better rewards, too, with the most coveted items being item level 210 pieces of equipment that are roughly equivalent in power to upgraded Esoterics gear — some of the best gear in the game at present.

There’s a bit of figuring out still to do here, but I enjoyed my two trips into The Diadem, and am looking forward to more.

The Void Ark

The new 24-player raid is a highlight of the new patch for sure, featuring some cool environments (with dynamic scripted environmental effects as you explore) and some great boss fights.

Overall, it feels a bit tougher than the Crystal Tower raids of A Realm Reborn, though this may be more to do with average gear levels than actual difficulty. There are certainly a couple of bosses in particular that seem to give groups difficulty, though, most notably the penultimate boss Cuchulainn, who has a whole raft of mechanics to contend with, and who proves to be something of a stumbling block for many alliances, for what I’ve heard. (The final boss Echidna is considerably easier after the horror that is Cuchulainn, though, which is something of a relief.)

I like Void Ark, and I especially like that it offers some decent rewards. The Item Level 200 gear is nice, but even nicer is the weekly guaranteed drop of an item that can be exchanged for Esoterics upgrade items, providing an easy means of boosting your overall power level by a bit.

Lord of Verminion

This was actually probably my biggest surprise of my 24-hour stream, as I ended up playing a whole lot of it and genuinely enjoying the experience. Not bad for something that I was ready to write off as a silly distraction that had no point whatsoever. I’m still not entirely sure it really has a point beyond playing just for the sake of it, but I found playing through the 24 single-player challenge missions to be great fun.

Lord of  Verminion allows you to use any of the collectible minions you’ve acquired over the course of the game in a real-time strategy game in which the basic aim is to destroy your opponent’s three Arcana Crystals before they do the same thing to you. Combat is based on a straightforward rock-paper-scissors mechanic — Poppet beats Monster beats Critter beats Poppet — but each minion also has its own HP, attack and defense values along with a special move that they can trigger when in a group of four identical units who have “charged” their Action Points. These special moves vary from temporary buffs to powerful attacks, and some of them remove the minions using them from the field, so you have to be a bit careful.

What I really liked about the single-player challenges is that rather than just a sequence of standard matches, you also have boss fights along the way, many of which actually use mechanics from their counterparts in the “real” dungeons and raids in Final Fantasy XIV. Most notably, the final Lord of Verminion challenge is essentially a recreation of Turn 4 of The Final Coil of Bahamut, with your summoned minions taking on the Elder Primal Bahamut himself, dodging his powerful Megaflare attacks while attempting to damage him as much as possible as quickly as possible.

Plus beating all 24 challenges gets you a Twintania minion, which I’m willing to bet not too many people have just yet, so I shall enjoy being one of the few for the little while that lasts!