Spent a bit more time with the non-story aspects of FFXIV's 3.4 patch Soul Surrender today, so here's a few thoughts with that in mind.
First up, I finished my first Wondrous Tails journal, albeit rather poorly, so I have a good handle of what that's all about now.
Wondrous Tails is a new weekly quest where you acquire a journal from the adorable young Miqo'te Khloe Aliapoh. Khloe wants to hear all about your adventures, so you agree to help her out by filling in her journal with tales of some of your exploits. You are then presented with 16 different challenges for the week, nine of which you need to clear to complete the journal.
On the opposite page to the challenges you are to face is a 4×4 grid of blank spaces for stickers. You acquire these stickers by completing the challenges — one per challenge, though you don't get to choose which sticker you get. Fill a line in the journal and there's a reward separate from the one for completing 9 challenges. Fill two lines and there's another reward. Fill three and there's another still. These rewards are significant, at higher tiers consisting of Allagan Tomestones of Scripture, the current "top end" endgame currency, and even item level 250 armour which, while not the best in the game at the moment, is certainly pretty good.
They are not, however, easy to accomplish, as I've discovered this week. It's not completely random chance as to whether or not you fill some lines — by helping new players complete duties for the first time, you earn "Second Chance" points, which can be used in one of two ways: firstly, to mark a completed challenge as incomplete while marking an incomplete one as complete. This effectively allows you to do something again while removing the need to do something you don't want to do. You can choose the complete challenge to make incomplete, but not the incomplete challenge to make complete. Alternatively, you can spend two Second Chance points to shuffle the entire board of seals (including the ones you've already placed) in the hope that you will get a more advantageous arrangement. In order to make three lines with nine seals, you need their placement to be absolutely perfect — a horizontal, a vertical and a diagonal. As such, it's a bit of a gamble that you can't necessarily rely on.
I gambled and failed, ending up with no lines at all by the time I had nine seals — you can only use the shuffle option when you have between three and seven seals, so you can't just shuffle a completed board around. Still, I at least got the reward for completing the journal for the week, which is meaningful in itself, and there's always next week to try again.
Next up, I jumped in to the randomly generated Palace of the Dead in an attempt to finish my Aetherpool weapon and get something to take the place of my outdated i210 Anima weapon until I can finish the upgrade process. New to Palace of the Dead in this patch is the addition of the Accursed Hoard, a series of hidden treasures that can only be located by using Pomanders of Intuition, which last until you unearth a piece of the Accursed Hoard. Your party banks the pieces of the Hoard until you complete the tier of the Palace that you're on, and like everything else, if you party wipes you lose them.
Assuming you successfully completed a tier, each piece of the Hoard the party acquired will reward you with a sealed sack which must be taken to a new NPC in Quarrymill to appraise. There then follows a gacha-style appraisal sequence, during which you can anticipate how good the item you're about to get is via the animation that plays (or not!) during the appraisal sequence. There are some decent items available through this system — in my first batch of three sacks, I got a paissa minion, the expensive Thavnairian Bustier top and a firework. In the seven other sacks I acquired throughout the evening, I got more fireworks. It seems fireworks are the default "normal" draw, at least from the common bronze sacks, but there seems to be an above-zero chance of getting rare items from this, too, making Palace of the Dead a worthwhile activity for reasons other than acquiring the weapon.
There's obviously a lot of RNG in both of these systems that I've described, and some people don't like that, preferring a predictable goal that you can take aim for and always see your progress towards. Final Fantasy XIV has always been heavily RNG-driven, however, and so these two systems, while having the potential for enormous frustration, are firmly in keeping with what we've come to expect from the game to date!
Final Fantasy XIV patch day has come and gone, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts. I'm going to mostly talk about the Main Scenario quests in this post, so I'll put in a Read More link for those browsing the front page who don't want to accidentally see spoilers.
The first MMO I really got into was Final Fantasy XI. This was after a few previous aborted attempts including EverQuest and Ultima Online (over dial-up — not recommended, particularly EverQuest, which crashed every time I zoned) as well as slightly lesser-known titles like Dark Age of Camelot.
I never stuck with the earlier games because they never quite resonated with me for one reason or another — perhaps it was their clunky interfaces or their painfully slow progression. All I know is that Final Fantasy XI, despite also having a clunky interface and painfully slow progression, managed to capture my attention for a decent period of time before I finally moved on to something else — Final Fantasy X-2, as I recall — and never went back.
Just recently, some Final Fantasy XIV friends and I have been getting nostalgic for XI, so I thought I'd go check it out, given that it's been a number of years and several expansion packs since I last tried it. And while the game is still recognisable as what it once was — a steadfastly traditional MMO more in the EverQuest mould than the now more fashionable WoW mould — it's been considerably streamlined to make the experience much more friendly to new players and solo players. On top of that, players now have a hefty amount of options to choose from when they log in and want to decide what to do next. This is not something Final Fantasy XI was ever lacking in, but the additions and refinements that have been added to the formula over the years benefit both new players and grizzled veterans.
Take the Fields of Valour and Records of Eminence systems, for example.
The former sees you examining "field manuals" in each zone and taking on a training regime of your choice. Completing said regime rewards you with experience, gil and a currency called tabs that can be traded in for various benefits ranging from teleporting back to your home city — a godsend if you've been grinding several zones away, since fast travel isn't anywhere near as accessible as it is in XIV — to having temporary buffs cast on yourself.
The latter, meanwhile, is accessed through your Quests menu and allows you to assign yourself up to 30 objectives at a time from an extremely comprehensive list of possible challenges that range from "defeat 100 enemies" to "deal 100,000 points of damage in total" via "loot 10 wind crystals from enemies". Most of these objectives are repeatable, and all reward you with experience points upon completion.
Just the addition of these two systems, which support the existing style of play FFXI veterans will be used to, makes levelling a considerably less painful, time-consuming process. What once took weeks of grinding can now be done in a few hours — to put it in context, I played for about 2 or 3 hours earlier and made it to level 16. First time I played this took me several weeks to achieve; in several months of play I never got any further than level 30.
It's a bit of an adjustment to go back to XI after the tightly structured gameplay of XIV. XI, by contrast, is much more freeform; there is a main storyline to follow, but it's of considerable benefit to players to go out and level up a bit first before even thinking about tackling these missions. The story can even be ignored completely if you'd rather just go out hacking and slashing monsters, unlike in XIV, where it was an integral part of overall progression by gradually unlocking game features and challenges as you went through.
One of the best additions to XI in recent years is the Trust system, which allows you to recruit "alter-ego" versions of various NPCs from around the game world after meeting the requirements to unlock them. Once unlocked, these "alter-egos" can be summoned at any time in the field for you to party up with, effectively allowing you the ability to take on considerably stronger monsters than you would otherwise be able to tackle solo, and all but eliminating the need for standing in Valkurm Dunes for hours at a time shouting "RDM LFG" in the hope that someone would pick you up to go and kill lots of crabs with.
One might say that the Trust system takes away from one of the key defining aspects of FFXI as a massively multiplayer online game, but in practice it's simply more convenient for many players. You still have the option to party up with other people, of course — and chances are they'll play their roles much better than the relatively limited AI of the Trust companions — but for those who prefer to play solo, Trust NPCs can form a formidable party with you once you've unlocked a few of them.
The other interesting contrast between FFXI and FFXIV is how it handles combat. XI's combat is relatively simple in the early levels, relying mostly on your auto-attack and occasional use of Weaponskills when your TP bar hits 1000 or greater. XIV, meanwhile, is much more active, demanding that you both dodge enemy attacks with telegraphed areas of effect and keep performing your class's combo or rotations as efficiently as possible, preferably without stopping. Both are considerably slower paced than true real-time combat, striking a good balance between a turn-based feel and actually allowing the player to feel like they are in full control of their character, but XI is even slower than XIV, providing you with plenty of time to pick abilities in advance from its traditional FF-style menu system rather than XIV's hotbars.
I've enjoyed returning to Vana'Diel so far; the experience contrasts well enough from XIV that the two games can sit quite comfortably beside one another in a gamer's collection, and the state they're both in in 2016 means that you can sit down for either a long or a short session with either and feel like you've achieved something.
Mostly I'm wanting to play through Final Fantasy XI to see its main story content, which is supposed to be good, but the sheer amount of stuff to do in the game — it's got over ten years on A Realm Reborn, after all — is more than likely to prove a bit distracting!
With it being Final Fantasy XIV's third anniversary it's only fitting that I take a look back at the reason I've been playing it since its closed beta — and why, even though on several occasions I've felt like I might be "done" with the game, I keep on coming back, time after time.
These memories are presented in no particular order, but it makes the most sense to start with this one.
Knowing FFXIV was going to be something special
I jumped into Final Fantasy XIV's closed beta after a casual discussion with a Twitter friend about Final Fantasy XI and how much I liked it despite never really getting all that far with it. Eventually I found myself with an invite to the testing period of the game, and I was immediately smitten with it. Everything about it felt Final Fantasy. The look, the feel, the music, the controls, the battles, the monsters — and yet, it had enough of its own unique identity to make it feel like far more than just series fanservice.
Specifically, Final Fantasy XIV adopts a somewhat "dark fantasy" tone throughout, clearly heavily inspired by works such as Game of Thrones and The Witcher in places. Sure, there are still moogles and chocobos, but there are also complicated political machinations, betrayal, murder and, technically, just prior to the start of 2.0's story, apocalyptic catastrophes.
I was immediately drawn into the world in a way that World of Warcraft never quite managed to enrapture me. NPC dialogue, although localised with more than a few liberties taken from the original Japanese, much to the chagrin of people who play with Japanese voiceovers, was beautifully written with an almost Shakespearean tone in places, blending old- and middle-English words and phrases with modern spellings to make it actually comprehensible.
The fact that Final Fantasy XIV placed any emphasis on its main story at all — let alone to the degree that it has ended up doing so — was a unique feeling for me. Even its predecessor Final Fantasy XI's main story had felt like a side activity you did when you had done enough level grinding to be able to take on the next mission; here, the main story was tightly tied in with your character's progression: you advanced through the levels and became more powerful both in terms of mechanics and narrative, until you eventually reached level 50 and took on your most terrifying challenges yet.
During the closed beta, I only played up to about level 20 or so, but that was enough to know that I wanted to keep playing — and to know that I wouldn't mind when the servers were wiped post-beta to prepare for the start of live service.
Making some great friends
My friend who had urged me to try out FFXIV was all set to assemble a Free Company — FFXIV's take on guilds — as soon as the facility became available, and many members of that free company, centred around the Giant Bomb video games website, became great friends. I even took a trip to PAX East to hang out with a bunch of them and had an absolute blast. And while I recently left said Free Company in favour of a smaller group who are more local to where my wife and I are, FFXIV's various ways of keeping in touch — as well as extra-game means of communication like Discord — mean that I'll never be far away from this band of loveable rogues.
Castrum and Prae keeping me up until 5am
When I reached level 50, I was proud. The only other MMO I'd ever reached the level cap in prior to that day was World of Warcraft, and I'd stopped playing shortly afterwards, as my lack of friends playing had made that game a rather lonely experience at high level — this was the days before its current Dungeon Finder system, itself inspired by FFXIV's Duty Finder.
I'd heard the final two story dungeons, intended to be done pretty much as soon as you hit 50, were quite an experience, and so I asked the Free Company very nicely to accompany me on my first run through them. This was — and still is — the best way to run these dungeons, since they're both full of cutscenes, and running with a completely preformed party means no risk of other people running ahead and starting boss fights while you're still watching dramatic scenes.
The experience of running Castrum Meridianum and Praetorium left such an impact on me that I immediately wrote about it on USgamer. It remains one of my fondest gaming memories to date, and it makes me a bit sad that people coming to it now will more than likely be partied up with a group of people who outgear it to such a degree that every boss fight is a complete steamrollering. Pro-tip, then — if you're just hitting 50 for the first time and you have 7 friends handy, queue up for Castrium then Prae and check the "minimum item level" option in Duty Finder in order to experience these two dungeons at their original difficulty level from shortly after launch.
Entering the Coil
I happened to be up and about one night when some Free Company-mates were heading into the endgame raid dungeon The Binding Coil of Bahamut. At this point, the raid had been "unlocked" because better gear than it offered was already available, and so it was there for people to run just for the experience of the unique story it offered, as well as unlocking subsequent chapters.
Coil was a whole other level of the game for me. The encounters were much more complex, they demanded much more coordination and awareness of what was going on, and the unique story, music and enemies you fought in there made it feel like a truly "special" experience.
Forming LoCoBomb and tackling Coil proper
Loose Cannons, or LoCo, were Giant Bomb's neighbours in the Limsa Lominsa housing district of Mist, and they're now my new Free Company. LoCo is a tiny little group compared to the hundreds of members of Giant Bomb (many of whom are inactive players, but still) but we struck up a mutual friendship with one another, even going so far as to put together a rather casual, slapdash static for tackling The Binding Coil of Bahamut, a little later than much of the rest of the player base, but tackling it nonetheless.
Raiding together was a great way for us to get to know one another better, and we had a lot of fun times working out way through the first four Turns until we hit our first real barrier: Turn 5.
Toppling Twintania
Turn 5 of Coil was originally the hardest fight in the entire game, facing a party of 8 players off against the rather angry dragon Twintania. Accompanied by the fantastic piece of music Thunderer, this was a genuinely terrifying confrontation in which you really felt like you were battling against insurmountable odds.
Twintania was our first real encounter with having to properly coordinate raid tactics thanks to now-notorious mechanics such as Divebombs and Twisters. Taking her down for the first time was an incredible feeling, only to be matched by the time we finally bested the final boss of the Second Coil of Bahamut.
Nailing Nael
Turn 9 of Coil — or Turn 4 of Second Coil, if you prefer — quickly took over from Turn 5 as being the hardest fight in the game, mostly due to how unforgiving it was. The fight featured a wide variety of tasty instant death mechanics and even a few sections where careless play could wipe the rest of the raid without too much difficulty.
After a long slog through Second Coil — Turn 6 gave us a lot of grief, though the subsequent two went a little smoother — LoCoBomb persevered and were eventually victorious, however, and we still weren't sick of the two incredible boss themes Tempest and Rise of the White Raven.
This encounter remains, to date, my favourite boss fight of all time in any game ever. Ten character levels, over a hundred item levels and one expansion later and it's still not particularly easy to clear.
Phoenix from the Flames
A lot of people will note that Turn 12 — Turn 3 of Final Coil — is as memorable an encounter as the grand finale Turn 13, and I'd certainly agree with that. Resolving a large number of questions surrounding what really happened at the end of Final Fantasy XIV 1.0, Turn 12 sees the party facing off against the iconic Phoenix, accompanied by this magnificent arrangement of the game's main theme Answers. I still get shivers every time I hear it. And the recent The Rising event in the game now brought it out at the perfect moment to genuinely give me goosebumps all over my body.
The Final Witness
The final battle in Final Coil is appropriately spectacular. It wasn't horrendously difficult by the time we got to it — each subsequent patch had increased the amount of bonus HP and damage you'd be blessed with when you went in, theoretically allowing more and more people of lesser skill and/or gear to enjoy all of Coil's story — but it was still an immensely worthy absolutely, positively, definitely final boss. And it made incredible use of Answers.
An in-game marriage and a real-life proposal
(if the embed doesn't work, go here to embarrass me)
January 3, 2015: Amarysse Jerhynsson married W'khebica Qimi (now Wuckle Bunny, because no-one can spell authentic Mi'qote names properly). During this process, the player behind Amarysse Jerhynsson — yours truly — made a rather lengthy virtual speech that culminated in him proposing to the player behind W'khebica Qimi, who was sitting in her study upstairs from him at the time.
We married in June 2015. And who says computer games are antisocial?
Heavensward and beyond
The first full expansion for Final Fantasy XIV was an exciting moment, as it would take us to brand new areas, see us tackling brand new dungeons and battling fierce new foes. It was everything most people hoped for, with an excellent story — to some, better even than A Realm Reborn's at times meandering narrative — and one hell of a final boss fight.
While the long lull between Heavensward's release and the first major content patch finally arrived with us was, I feel, largely responsible for the fact that my former Free Company are no longer quite as obviously "active" (at least in public channels) as they used to be, Heavensward has, on the whole, been a great evolution of A Realm Reborn's base, even introducing a number of brand new types of content to the mix, with my favourite being the new randomly generated Deep Dungeon.
Heavensward's raid scene hasn't appealed that much — I'm not really a fan of steampunk in general, and the narrative set up around Alexander was feeble and unmemorable compared to the majesty of Coil — but there's still been plenty of stuff to do, and as we saw with the Live Letter yesterday, there will continue to be more and more stuff to do as we start the buildup to the second full expansion, set to be revealed for the first time in October.
It's not many games you can play almost continually for three years and still look upon fondly, but I guess anything you spend that much time in the company of eventually becomes something you really, truly can't ever let go of.
It's hard to get this across to people who haven't been on the journey I've been on, and it probably won't be quite the same for someone who starts right now, but I stand by my nomination of Final Fantasy XIV as my Game of the Year for 2013 over on USgamer, and given the number of hours I've played, it's probably my GotY for 2014, 2015 and 2016 too.
It's 5am and I'm still up because I decided it would be a really smart thing to do to stay up and watch the beginning of the 14-hour livestream to celebrate Final Fantasy XIV's third anniversary. It's not as if I have to get up for anything in the morning, though, so it's fine.
The reason why I wanted to watch at least the start of the livestream is because of the Live Letter from the development team, featuring a preview of the upcoming patch 3.4. These are always interesting and exciting, because they often reveal new game features and content, some of which ends up being a surprise to everyone.
I'm interested to see where 3.4 goes because the story begun in Heavensward is now essentially over — patch 3.3 saw adventurers defeating the dread wyrm Nidhogg and saving Ishgard from another thousand years of war with the dragons.
Previous patches did, however, tease the existence of dark counterparts to the player's Warrior of Light, and it looks as if 3.4 and 3.5 will concern these individuals in the run-up to whatever the next full expansion will be. (We find that out in October.)
I'm watching a livestream with a concurrent live fan translation, so I'll just write some thoughts as I watch, then post the whole shebang in one go when it's done.
3.4 will be called Soul Surrender and concern the aforementioned Warriors of Darkness. It will also apparently feature a great deal of lore about the planet of Hydaelyn itself, where the game takes place. It will be out on Tuesday, September 27.
As usual, there will be new main scenario quests advancing the main storyline. It looks as if Alphinaud and Alisaie will finally be reunited after being apart for pretty much all of A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. Alisaie was the main NPC for the excellent Binding Coil of Bahamut raids in A Realm Reborn, and apparently this patch's story will make reference to Coil, even going so far as to change dialogue if you previously completed Coil. (Cue a rush on unsync'd Coil runs!)
There will also be new Scholasticate quests. These started a couple of patches ago and sort of tailed off without any resolution, but they had potential to be interesting.
And Hildibrand will be back. His content has been a little weak in Heavensward, lacking the custom boss fights of A Realm Reborn, but his quests have nonetheless remained amusing and well written.
There will be some tweaks to the battle system, including recast timers being reset when restarting battles — a godsend for raiders or people trying to clear new content for the first time. The changes will also include some changes to auto-attack — Yoshi-P mentioned he wanted to make some changes here in a recent interview with Famitsu, and it looks like we're going to get the first stage of that with 3.4 — you'll no longer have to worry about character facing, just be in range of your foe. In other words, this means you can keep moving around a target without worrying about losing auto-attack damage for those periods when you're not directly facing it. Good news for bards and machinists in particular, who are perhaps more reliant on auto-attack damage than most.
Some Extreme Primal fights will be added to the recently added Raid Finder. These Trials aren't quite full-on raids, but still have quite a lot of complexity, so it will be good to have a means to organise learning or clear parties other than Party Finder.
The UI will have a Countdown feature added. Exactly what this does remains to be seen, but it's apparently intended to be a replacement for macros that some players used, perhaps to announce when certain abilities come off cooldowns.
The final chapter of the Alexander raid cycle is coming this time around: Alexander, The Creator and a Savage counterpart. Last chance for them to get this right after a somewhat lukewarm reception from much of the player base.
There's a new trial that sounds as if it will be a second member of the Warring Triad, since it's called Containment Bay P1T6, much like the previous Sephirot fight. Apparently the foe this time will be Sophia, the Goddess.
New dungeons include Xelphatol, the Ixali homeland, and a Hard mode variant of The Great Gubal Library. Still just two rather than the three ARR got with each patch, though this isn't surprising any more.
PvP is getting a duel mode that can be done in the Wolves' Den in a new part of the map. You'll be able to queue for dungeons while dueling, which is nice, and there will be no time limit; matches only end when someone wins or leaves the duel area.
PvP will also get a Custom Match feature allowing two light parties to set up a clash against each other, and a Spectator mode. FFXIV's PvP is actually pretty good, so it's good to see it getting some love.
The roguelike-esque dungeon Palace of the Dead will get an update in patch 3.45, bringing it to 200 floors total. There will be a job-specific ranking system based on a score you build up as you play. Floors 51-100 will be about the same difficulty as the current floors and bring the dungeon's story to a close. Above floor 100, things get much harder but they'll be worth many more ranking points.
Grand Companies are getting an update after being dormant pretty much since 2.0. A new Grand Company rank will finally be available, Platoons will become available and have some sort of missions attached to them, and new gear will be available, presumably this time geared to level 60 characters.
The Platoon system looks to have something to do with raising NPCs, and you'll be able to go into content with these NPCs from the sound of things — you can make a team of one player and three NPCs.
A new game feature is Wondrous Tails, which involves helping a young Mi'qote girl create something by completing objectives in a book. No other details were given.
Gold Saucer is getting an instanced Triple Triad battle hall for each data centre, allowing you to find opponents from other servers and thus expanding the minigame's scope considerably.
RTS minigame Lord of Verminion will also be added to the Duty Finder, allowing you to queue up and find opponents that way.
Housing updates will include the introduction of the Apartment system, presumably functioning something along the lines of Final Fantasy XI's Mog House system. It looks as if there will be a public lobby in each building as well as instanced rooms for players, and there will be 1536 apartments per server, assuming 3 buildings (one for each of the Eorzean cities) with 512 rooms each. They will cost 500,000 Gil, so much cheaper than current housing. Hopefully they won't all get bought up to be resold!
A system called the Double Cross Hotbar will be introduced for controller players. It's intended for people who don't feel they have enough available buttons when playing with a controller and want to be quicker to get at certain abilities. You'll be able to double-tap a trigger to access the extra buttons, and it can be used in conjunction with the existing Expanded Cross-Hotbar for even more available buttons. Essentially it adds an extra 16 button slots, and you'll have the option to keep these visible on screen at all times, and adjust the transparency of the hotbar you're not using at the time to make it clear what actions you have available.
The Double Cross Hotbar stuff looks like a great quality of life improvement for the game. Is it wrong that this is one of the things I'm most excited about? It will certainly make more complex jobs more straightforward to play with controller. Apparently Yoshi-P and his team are pretty excited about it too, as I think they spent more time showing it off than anything else in the Live Letter!
The exploratory missions to The Diadem are getting some minor updates, including the ability to queue as a gatherer rather than having to change once you get there. It will also start dropping item level 235 gear, making it potentially worthwhile again. A brand new exploratory mission — hopefully with lessons learned from the Diadem — will come in patch 3.5.
The new Allagan Tomestone endgame currency will be Tomestones of Scripture, and the gear they purchase is rather Sharlayan in its look, particularly the Dragoon's rather fetching robe and hat combo.
An online status for role-players will be added. FFXIV doesn't seem to have that many RPers in my experience, but that doesn't mean they're not thete, so having a means for them to find each other will be good. You'll also be able to use hyphens in character names at last — no more errant apostrophes!
Finally, The Rising event starts today. Last year this was an awesomely meta event in the game where you could warp out of Eorzea and visit the writers' room to meet the development staff. It was an extremely cool moment, and gave the feeling that the FFXIV team love and are grateful for their players.
Exciting times ahead for the game, then, and I'm well and truly back on board after my short break from it. Events like this remind me why I can never quite quit it.
I last played World of Warcraft in the Wrath of the Lich King era. I played it off and on ever since launch, to be honest, but it was Wrath of the Lich King that saw me finally get to the level cap, although looking back on my time with the game through the eyes of an experienced Final Fantasy XIV endgame player, I now realise that I barely scratched the surface of what WoW had to offer.
World of Warcraft is one of those games that I consider to be part of the ill-defined, amorphous "gaming canon" — it's a game that I thoroughly believe everyone should play for at least a short time to understand what an impact it's had on the games industry as a whole: its importance to popular game design, the influence it's had on other games, and the aspects that it's drawn from its successors back into itself to evolve and adapt.
Like most MMOs, it's fascinating to chart how WoW has changed over the years because it's virtually unrecognisable from when it first hit the market. This most recent time I've been taking a look at it represents probably the biggest change I've seen to the overall game structure and experience, and among other things it's put certain aspects of my Final Fantasy XIV experience into a broader context.
My time with Wrath of the Lich King was spent primarily playing PvE (Player vs Environment) in the game's open world. This is still an entirely viable way to play World of Warcraft right the way through until level cap, unlike something like Final Fantasy XIV, which gates significant portions of the main story behind group content, albeit only of the most casual, straightforward variety right up until you reach the original level cap of 50.
The pacing of WoW is also very different to Final Fantasy XIV. While Final Fantasy XIV is relatively slow-paced with an almost turn-based feel thanks to its long "global cooldown" — the period of time between which you can use most of your abilities — WoW is relatively fast-paced and frantic. This comes at a slight cost, though: whereas Final Fantasy XIV's encounters are, for my money, much more interesting thanks to their strong emphasis on dodging and being in the right place at the right time — a distinctly Japanese approach to encounter design — World of Warcraft appears to be, to my limited experience, much more about gearing up and overpowering your enemies as much as possible. There's still an element of "don't stand in the shit" at times, but not to anywhere near the same degree as Final Fantasy XIV.
The two approaches are both valid, although the fact that it's possible to WoW-style overpower some of what used to be Final Fantasy XIV's most formidable encounters leads to a certain feeling of dissonance at times; there's always that feeling of conflict between the beautifully paced and choreographed encounter that the designers of Final Fantasy XIV put together, and the players' desire to bulldoze their way through it as quickly as possible. It's sort of a shame to see what a mockery modern groups make of fights like Garuda Extreme, although when you take this in the context of Final Fantasy XIV being a JRPG at core, it could simply be likened to the experience of level-grinding to a ridiculous degree, then steamrollering everything that once gave you grief into oblivion.
WoW also feels a lot more "free" than Final Fantasy XIV thanks to its diminished focus on storytelling — something which I always used to regard as a bit of a drawback to Blizzard's game, but which with more seasoned eyes I can see allows it to feel much more explicitly "game-like" than Final Fantasy XIV. This may sound odd, but it's true: FFXIV very much likes to put everything in some sort of narrative context, necessitating unlocking everything manually by completing various quests, whereas modern WoW simply unlocks things automatically and organically as you level up; you can jump into a dungeon as soon as you hit level 15 without having made prerequisite progress through a questline, whereas Final Fantasy XIV brings you to your first dungeon as part of its main scenario.
Modern WoW also features something I like very much, but which further contributes to its "game-like" feel: the Adventure Guide. This screen can be popped up at any time after level 10 and gives you suggestions of what to do next, allowing you to automatically start questlines without having to manually go to the location first, jump into dungeon queues the moment you've unlocked them, and even review strategy guides for dungeon bosses to save the tedious cries of "go watch a youtube video, noob" when a more inexperienced player enters group content for the first time.
WoW also seems to have taken some inspiration from Final Fantasy XIV's FATE (Full Active Time Event) system in the form of its pre-expansion Invasions. These are events that occur in the open world and require the cooperation of multiple players (albeit not in an organised manner) to accomplish various challenges. WoW's Invasions are much larger in scale than FFXIV's FATEs, however; an Invasion typically encompasses an entire zone, with objectives scattered around the place, whereas FFXIV's FATEs are constrained to a smaller area.
WoW also makes use of an incredibly elegant scaling system for these Invasions, where the monsters that appear as part of the event appear at different levels according to each player's own level. For example, I was participating in one earlier tonight as a level 12 character, so the enemies were appearing as level 12 with appropriate amounts of health and damage. Meanwhile, my friend Cat came to join me on her level 100 character, and the enemies appeared to her as level 100, with appropriately inflated amounts of health and outgoing damage. The higher-level characters still have an advantage due to better gear and a wider selection of available abilities, but it's nice that it's so simple for people of different levels to be able to cooperate on something and get meaningful rewards from it — it's a bit more elegant than FFXIV's slightly clunky Level Sync system in that you're not artifically gimping yourself to participate; the encounter gimps itself to lower-level players.
One thing where I've felt WoW has always had the edge over Final Fantasy XIV is in terms of gear. FFXIV has a strictly vertical gear progression system, with very little in the way of variety within each tier of equipment. As you're levelling, you get a new set of gear roughly every 5 levels or so until you reach level 50, at which point a few dungeon runs will allow you to purchase gear that will take you to about level 58 before you need to replace it. Once you hit 60, there are generally two or three "tiers" of gear that are "relevant" at any one time — one that is available with the endgame currency that has no weekly cap on it, one that is available with the endgame currency that does have a weekly cap on it, and, depending on what stage in the patch cycle the game is at, one or more tiers of raid gear from either the 24-player "casual" raid or the 8-player super-difficult "Savage" raid. In other words, everyone at an equivalent gear level in FFXIV will be wearing the exact same stuff as other people playing that class, though the last set to be introduced did at least encourage the insertion of Materia for limited customisation of secondary stats.
WoW, meanwhile, has a huge variety of gear right from the get-go. Shitty grey gear, poor white gear, slightly more exciting green gear, very exciting blue gear, mega-exciting purple gear and OMG I GOT IT Legendary gear. (And possibly some more tiers besides.) WoW throws a lot more loot at the player than FFXIV, particularly during dungeon runs, with green gear in particular taking an almost Diablo-esque approach to itemisation with prefixes and suffixes denoting variations on a particular item level's gear.
FFXIV does have an item "rarity" system along these lines — there are white, pink, green, blue and purple items — but in practice, getting a blue item simply means that you've acquired some level-cap gear, and purple items are, so far as I know, exclusively for the grind-tastic Relic and Anima weapons at levels 50 and 60 respectively. The only items that have any real variety to them are the pink items you find in dungeons while levelling up; these have standardised basic stats for the item level, but randomised secondary stats. In practice, though, it never really feels like the secondary stats make that much difference; perhaps this will change at higher item levels, but at the moment, adding 5 points of Determination on to your armour doesn't feel like it has a big impact on how powerful you are, and this is, I feel, a real weakness of FFXIV that should be addressed in future expansions.
Do I like one better than the other? No, I actually like them both for different reasons, and can quite feasibly see myself playing both, since they're both enjoyable and distinct experiences from one another. Oddly enough, spending a few hours playing WoW and getting to level 20 has made me appreciate the things that FFXIV does better, and also given me a certain amount of understanding as to why some players are the way they are. That doesn't excuse their behaviour at times, of course, but if you look at how they play in the context of having had previous experience with how WoW does things, certain behaviours like the desire for speedruns or overpowering encounters start to make a little more sense.
All in all, it's been a positive experience — and if you're a lapsed WoW player who has been thinking about checking out what the game looks like in 2016, I'd encourage you to do so. The experience for new players has been made a whole lot smoother, and the whole package is significantly slicker than it once was. Plus, regardless of whether or not you bought any of the previous expansions, all WoW players now get all the expansions up to Warlords of Draenor completely free, with only the impending Legion requiring you to spend any additional money. The game as a whole seems much more friendly to short, casual sessions than it used to be, and that can only be a good thing — though naturally once you hit endgame, it doubtless won't be long before the desire to raid kicks in… and that's when things get a bit time-consuming!
I am sad about this. Really, genuinely sad. The game has been an important part of my life for quite some time now, and will always be special to me — hell, it's where I proposed to my wife.
But I think I'm gone for good this time. I've just had enough.
Not of the game, mind you; the game itself remains one of my favourites, with an enjoyably rhythmic combat system, plenty of distinction between classes and some truly memorable encounters — not to mention an incredible soundtrack and a great story.
No, I've had enough of the people who infest it.
The community's slide into unpleasantness has been a gradual but noticeable process. Whereas I described FFXIV's player base in my USgamer review (circa 2.0-era A Realm Reborn) as one of the most helpful, supportive and friendly communities in gaming, these days I regrettably can't say the same — though I find myself pondering whether or not it's because at the time I wrote that review, I'd only been playing endgame content for a short period.
Let me talk a bit about the incident that drove me over the edge today, then I'll talk a bit in more general terms about what I feel has gone wrong.
A short while back — like, earlier this week — FFXIV introduced a new type of content called Deep Dungeon. This was a completely new way to play the game, and involved descending into a 50-floor dungeon with up to three companions and clearing it out, one randomly generated floor at a time. The rewards on offer include tokens called "potsherds", which can be exchanged for various valuable items, and if you fully upgrade the weapon and armour you use in the Deep Dungeon — these are separate from those which you use in the main game — you get a high-level weapon for a level 60 character that is not quite the very best in the game, but certainly very respectable and suitable for all levels of content.
Upgrading the weapon and armour requires that you find silver treasure chests in the Deep Dungeon. Opening one of these will do one of three things: upgrade your weapon, upgrade your armour or explode, dealing damage to you and anyone unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. The deeper you go into the dungeon, the more likely it seems you are to come across trapped chests, and your weapon's upgrade level is also capped by your character's level within the deep dungeon — also measured independently of progress in the main game. To put it another way: your weapon and armour can go up to level +30, and in order to upgrade them to this level your character must reach level 60 in the Deep Dungeon, though thankfully levelling up is considerably quicker than in the main game.
After completing all 50 floors once, it's likely that your weapon and armour will be around the +10 to +15 mark, depending on how lucky you've been. This means you then have to challenge the dungeon again from floor 1 but with your upgraded gear, hoping you'll get luckier on the deeper floors this time. As incentive to run it again, however, every 10 floors gives you a generous shot of gil as well as Allagan Tomestones of Poetics, Esoterics and Lore, all of which are used to purchase the best level 50 or 60 gear available, so it's not as if running the upper floors again is a useless waste of time. Alternatively, if you enter the Deep Dungeon on a class you don't yet have to level 60 in the main game, completing 10 floors awards you with a large chunk of XP for your character's level in the main game, so it's also a good means of levelling alternative classes.
You may have surmised from that description that this structure puts a lot of pressure on Floors 41-50 to get players up to the magical +30/+30 needed to take away a shiny new weapon into the main game. And indeed, this is where the problems arise, with players doing everything from skipping fights with monsters that they don't feel the party "needs" to fight (despite some players not having reached level 60 at this point, and some enemies dropping treasure chests) to outright Vote Abandon-ing the whole dungeon if they don't feel they got "enough" silver chests in the first couple of floors.
I ran into one of these people today: a white mage, which is to say, a healer, and so an important, useful part of any group. Deep Dungeon, unlike everything else in the game, doesn't matchmake you into a party made up of one tank, one healer and two DPS, so it's entirely possible you'll find yourself running in a group with no healer at times, and as such having a healer in your group is something to be celebrated.
Unless it was this guy. Right from the very start of Floor 41, he ran off in completely the opposite direction to the rest of the party, leaving the remaining three of us to fight off monsters and get afflicted with various status effects that could have easily been cleansed if he had been there. But no; he had places to be, apparently, and finding those silver chests was more important than actually helping the other three people in there.
"Will you PLEASE stop running off?" piped up one of my companions halfway through Floor 42, obviously getting as impatient as I was with this git's shenanigans.
"I'm skipping mobs," replied our friend.
I then pointed out that not everyone in our party was level 60 yet — one was 56, one was 58 — and thus it would be in everyone's interest to kill as many monsters as possible, particularly as it's also necessary to kill a certain number to open the exit to the next floor anyway. He then complained about us being "slow" and "inefficient", and took great umbrage at several of us accusing him of "speedrunning".
Speedrunning is a bit of an issue in Final Fantasy XIV as a whole, particularly in dungeons, most of which are tuned more to the "casual" end of the difficulty spectrum, but nonetheless remain a good source of income for those valuable Tomestones. With a well-geared, confident party that knows what it is doing, most dungeons can be cleared in about 10 minutes or so, but this relies on everyone being both well-geared and confident in the speedrunning process, which usually involves the tank pulling as many enemies as possible at the same time, the healer working overtime to keep their HP topped up and the DPS doing area-effect attacks as much as possible.
It's quick, sure. It's also boring, because more often than not fighting like this means that you use maybe two or three of your complete suite of abilities, and fighting the monsters just becomes a case of standing in place hitting the same buttons over and over for ten minutes. Not interesting, and certainly not doing justice to the impressive encounters the Final Fantasy XIV team have created throughout the game. But no, at some point between 2.0 and 3.35, where we are now, someone somewhere decided that the de facto way to run dungeons was as quickly — sorry, "efficiently" — as possible, and woe betide anyone who slows it down for any reason, even if, say, the tank or healer say they don't feel confident or geared enough to do it.
Now, the thing with Deep Dungeon is that speedrunning is largely pointless, because monsters respawn, everyone needs to level up, you need to kill a certain number of monsters to open the exit to the next floor and, as with any good role-playing game, if you split the party you're probably asking for a bad time. With the levels being randomly generated, too, there's no set route through each floor, either, so you can't even work out a route that lets you avoid certain encounters as in certain fixed dungeons in the game, so it's really more trouble than it's worth.
That didn't stop this obnoxious White Mage from arguing his case increasingly aggressively though, eventually descending to insults about his perception of the rest of the party's skill levels. Hilariously, he even had a go at me on the grounds that I "wouldn't last five minutes in Expert Roulette" (the current two highest difficulty level 60 dungeons, neither of which are very tough) — I chose not to engage with him by explaining that actually, I had been playing the game since its open beta and as such knew it pretty fucking well by this point. Instead, I just voted to dismiss him from the party; my companions silently agreed, and thankfully he was booted shortly afterwards, to be replaced by a much friendlier person who unfortunately wasn't a healer.
This White Mage's attitude is representative of a considerable proportion of Final Fantasy XIV's player base as it stands today: the game, for these people, is about the relentless pursuit of "efficiency" so that they can acquire all the best gear, get all the achievements — achieve whatever they want to achieve, in other words — as quickly as possible then, in all likelihood, go on the official forums and Reddit to complain that three months is too long between content patches and that there's "nothing to do", despite smaller patches with additional features (such as Deep Dungeon, which was a significant addition) being added on a monthly basis.
I also saw this among a number of active Final Fantasy XIV players I used to follow on Twitter. There was a marked shift in their attitude over time; one person in particular that I started following as a result of attending an in-game "funeral" for a player who had sadly passed away in real life began as a very pleasant person to talk about the game with. But gradually over time he started caring more and more about parser figures — a parser being an external program you can run to see how much damage per second (DPS) everyone in the party is doing, a common means of harassing other players for "not pulling their weight" and technically against the game's Terms of Service, though I don't know of anyone who has been punished for it. He'd complain about parties he'd come across in Duty Finder; he'd post images of the parser figures; he'd shame people for not playing "well enough" or being "lazy". That relentless pursuit of "efficiency"; your DPS must be this high to ride.
I just can't stand it any more. It's ruined the game for me. Dungeons that I used to love running, like A Realm Reborn's final storyline dungeons Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium, lose all their drama by people skipping all cutscenes — and yelling at people who don't — and speedrunning their way through as quickly as possible, even if someone in the group hasn't seen this part of the story before. (Not coincidentally, those two dungeons were also the last to have lengthy cutscenes in the middle of the dungeon run.) If I decide I want a leisurely run through a dungeon rather than a stressful but boring speedrun, I get yelled at. If someone in the party makes a mistake and there's a single death, everyone gets yelled at. And apparently not going fast enough in Deep Dungeon is now a cardinal sin, too.
Fuck all that. Fuck everyone who has ruined one of my favourite games of the last few years. And fuck this shitty behaviour being considered "normal" in all games, not just Final Fantasy XIV — indeed, I'm under no illusions, and am well aware that this sort of thing is a problem in all MMOs.
I just thought Final Fantasy XIV's communitywas better than that. It certainly was once — at least, I think it was. But no longer. The buildup of this crappy behaviour and how not-fun this makes the game for me has led me to both cancel my subscription and uninstall the game completely for the first time ever since open beta. And I doubt I'm the only one who feels this way.
Patch day for Final Fantasy XIV today, and it seems like a good one so far. I haven't yet delved into absolutely everything on offer — partly because I went out for the evening — but what I've seen so far is pretty great.
Of particular note is The Final Steps of Faith, the big new Trial for this patch. This sees players taking on the mighty Nidhogg in a battle to the death as he brings the full force of his rage down on Ishgard and those he believes to have betrayed him.
The Final Steps of Faith is a cool fight, because — at the moment, anyway — it's genuinely challenging, even in its story mode incarnation. It's not excessively difficult by any means — the challenge factor comes from the fact that you actually have to pay attention to mechanics and can't just cheese your way through it. I'm all for this; while there's a certain amount of pleasure in being able to overpower old content with top-end gear, it's always a bit of a disappointment when fights that were once challenging, exciting and dramatic become a matter of simply soaking up all the damage being thrown at you and repeatedly smacking the enemy in the teeth.
I'm sure this situation won't last with The Final Steps of Faith, but for now it's nice to have an important storyline fight carry the appropriate amount of drama for the context.
This got me thinking back to the reasonably hefty amount of time I spent playing World of Warcraft, and how that game never quite got me feeling excited about combat. Things got a little better when I went a bit crazy modding the game's UI and added a "Jukebox" mod that allowed you to play music in combat, but it still never felt quite the same as an exciting encounter in a single-player RPG.
Final Fantasy XIV, meanwhile, absolutely nails the drama aspect. While the movement-heavy nature of combat means that it's not able to include the sort of cinematic camera work that people have associated with Final Fantasy since VII hit PS1s all those years ago, the combination of amazing music, gorgeously spectacular visual effects and a genuine feeling that you're struggling against a foe of unimaginable power help make the game's most important fights shine as some of the most memorable things I've ever done in a game — and certainly in an online game.
I've now finished the main story (and the enjoyable, optional "post-story" quest, which had a really heartwarming ending) so I find myself pondering what's next for Heavensward. While this patch brings the Dragonsong War plot arc to a close, there are still some unresolved threads that are clearly going to be tugged at further in the next couple of patches, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing how the stakes will be raised towards some sort of dramatic showdown that will inevitably lead into the next full expansion pack.
And in the meantime, I hear those bloody Moogles need some help with their crafting…
I got burnt out on Final Fantasy XIV a little while back and haven't felt particularly tempted to go back since — especially since my Free Company had been less than conversational for the last few months, making even the social aspect of the game less worth logging in for than it had been.
At PAX East this week, Square Enix announced an exciting new plan for some future content that has me clamouring to get back to the game once it releases: a new type of activity called Deep Dungeon, which will be familiar to fans of both Final Fantasy Tactics' Midlight's Deep optional dungeon and Final Fantasy XI's Nyzul Isle.
It sounds as if Deep Dungeon is going to be a discrete type of activity for players to participate in, with the eventual plan presumably being to have a number of different dungeons for players to challenge. Initially, there will be just one, called Palace of the Dead.
The reason this excites me so much is because it shakes up the established formula of Final Fantasy XIV — which, don't get me wrong, I like very much, but just needed a break from, thanks to the necessity of grinding the same content week after week in order to obtain the next incremental upgrade. Unlike the current substantial array of static content available in the game, Deep Dungeon has a strong random element, plus a great deal more flexibility than the rest of the game's reliance on the MMO "Holy Trinity" of tank, healer and DPS.
Deep Dungeon sees you and up to three friends tackling a randomly generated dungeon. It also has its own progression system separate from the main game's experience and item levels, mitigating the issue the game currently has of a significant proportion of players outgearing the majority of the current content. The in-game reasons for this are that the dungeon saps your character's strength, and in order to power back up again you'll have to make use of items you find within the dungeon itself, progressing and regaining your strength as you proceed.
If it's anything like Final Fantasy XI's Nyzul Isle — which FFXI veterans inform me, it sounds very much like — then each floor of the dungeon will not only be randomly generated, but it will also have various objectives to complete, as well as challenging boss fights every so often. It sounds like a lot of fun — and I really like the fact that it's seemingly flexible enough to cater to any party makeup from 1-4 players, hopefully leading to some interesting combinations of classes exploring the depths. All-tank runs? Bring it on!
I have questions that will hopefully be answered in the coming months: firstly, what will the point of Deep Dungeon be? Will it be another means of acquiring progression currency, or will it be a completely separate activity? My main concern with it is that it ends up being a Diadem, which sounded awesome in concept but turned out to be a bit toss when it was actually released. Part of this was down to player attitudes, admittedly, rather than any real fault with the content itself, but hopefully the smaller scale of Deep Dungeon will mitigate this risk somewhat.
To be honest, if Deep Dungeon proves to be a significant enough challenge with enough variation on each run, I can see it becoming one of my main activities in Final Fantasy XIV, particularly if I have the option of running it either solo or with friends. And with the promise of score rankings coming in a future update, there's the distinct possibility of some friendly competition, too.
The first Deep Dungeon, Palace of the Dead, is due to arrive in the game as part of Patch 3.35. I'm planning on jumping back into the game around Patch 3.3 to find out what happens next in the main scenario quest — the story is getting very interesting — but if Deep Dungeon lives up to its potential, 3.35 will see me getting back into things in a big way.
Please don't mess it up, Yoshi-P and co. I have faith in you!
Playing some Dungeon Travelers 2 this evening, I found myself pondering exactly why I have, so far, spent 130 hours on this game — the longest I've ever spent on a single-player RPG, I believe — while a short time back, I decided that I really needed to take a break from Final Fantasy XIV, which was previously something of a life and free time-devourer.
On reflection, it comes down to a need for progression; more specifically, a need for a near-constant feeling of progression.
Herein lies the main reason I've set Final Fantasy XIV aside for the time being, and it's by no means an issue exclusive to that game, either — it's a genre-wide thing with all MMOs. And that issue is that once you reach "endgame" level — i.e. you hit the level cap, and progression becomes about acquiring better gear and taking on tougher challenges rather than earning experience points and levelling up — progression stops being constant and instead comes in fits and starts, in extreme cases, with instances of actually improving coming weeks apart from one another.
To put this in some sort of context for those who are unfamiliar with MMO endgames: you have several means of acquiring new gear at the level cap in Final Fantasy XIV. You can loot it from dungeons, which is based on random drops. You can acquire it from the raid dungeon Alexander, but this requires strategically acquiring items from its various floors, because you are limited in what you can acquire each week and different bits of gear require different numbers of items. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Esoterics, which have no limit on how many you can acquire per week. You can acquire it using Tomestones of Lore, of which you're limited to collecting 450 per week. You can take on the lengthy Anima Weapon quest. Or you can acquire it by running the top-tier challenging stuff such as the latest Extreme primal fights or Alexander on Savage difficulty.
Part of the issue here, I guess, is that everyone generally wants to go for the biggest upgrade possible at any given time, and it's these bigger upgrades that you're somehow limited in, meaning progress is artificially constrained. In order to earn a piece of body armour using Tomestones of Lore, for example, which is among the best equipment in the game right now, you need at least two weeks to earn the 825 or so Tomestones required, since you're capped at 450. In that intervening period, all you're doing is grinding for no discernible gain: the actual gain comes only when you've finished the process and you get your shiny new armour. (And then moan about it not having the stats you want, probably.)
Now, this sort of design is a key part of how MMOs generally keep people engaged over a long period — if everyone could get the best possible gear immediately, they'd complain about having "not enough content" more than they do already (which is a lot), and that is obviously undesirable for the development team, who are put under pressure to put out more content more quickly, which inevitably leads to quality suffering. Instead, these moments of progression are significant, but time-consuming: they have a noticeable impact on your character's abilities, but only after a long period of doing the same things over and over again until you've earned enough whatevers to get your doohickey.
That sort of treadmill progression had started to become a little less enjoyable to me than it had been, particularly as the current endgame of Final Fantasy XIV now has a number of different grindathons required to get the best possible gear. And so I put it down for now and instead focused on Dungeon Travelers 2's postgame (actually bigger than the main game) which is also a grindfest, but which is considerably more appealing to me right now for that feeling of constant rather than sporadic progression.
Progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 comes in several forms. The most obvious is in the earning of experience points and levelling up: finishing the main story will get you to about level 50, but the postgame will take you to the cap of 99 by its conclusion. This means that rather than hitting a level cap early and progression slowing by very nature of one of its sources being cut off, there's the constant satisfaction of earning experience points right up until the end of the game. And if you're still hungry for more, a "Level Reset" system allows you to discard those hard-earned levels in favour of some bonuses to the character's base stats if they had reached a high enough level, meaning you can level them up all over again and they'll be marginally better.
That's not the only means of progression, though. Gear is another important aspect of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2, much like other dungeon crawlers. The gear system is very interesting, in fact, since it's based around just a few base items, and then built upon with an enchantment system. What happens is you have a piece of base gear (say, a piece of leather armour) which has a bonus value attached to it (say, +5). The bonus indicates how much better than its base incarnation it is, and the value can keep going up and up and up. In order to make it go up, you have to enchant your gear using the Sealbooks you acquire by defeating sets of 9 of each monster in the game. Each of these Sealbooks has a level, and when you use it to enchant a piece of gear, two things happen: the bonus goes up by the tens value of the Sealbook's level (up to a maximum of 5 for books of level 50 and above) and one or more of the Sealbook's special effects (ranging from bonuses to stats to special effects such as regenerating health and TP each turn) is attached to the piece of gear.
Here's an example. I have a set of Leather Armour+40. I run across the wandering blacksmith in a dungeon, who allows you to enchant your gear. I use a level 50 Sealbook to enchant the armour, which increases its bonus to +45 and attaches a DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect to it, making it considerably more defensive than before. Then I use another level 50 Sealbook of the same type to boost it to +50 and keep the same enchantments. Then I use a different Sealbook of a level higher than 50 (to increase the bonus, the Sealbook must be of a higher level than the bonus' current value) to boost it to +55 and add a Max HP Up effect to my existing DEF Up and Elemental Resistance Up effect, since equipment over +50 can have three, not two, effects attached to it. By this point, I've run out of money for the moment, so I take my leave of the bear blacksmith (yes, really) and proceed on my way, secure in the knowledge that I could upgrade that armour twice more before it becomes "capped" and I'd have to start looking for a stronger base item to progress further gear-wise.
These two systems intertwine so that you're always making one form of progress or the other. Levelling is quite slow in Dungeon Travelers 2 compared to more conventional JRPGs, but it has a noticeable impact, particularly on your characters' maximum HP. In the meantime, you can partly plug the gap for an underleveled character by giving them gear with huge bonuses — there's no level restrictions on equipping items — but you'll need to level them to ensure their survival and their usefulness in most cases.
But that's not all, either. The third means of progression in Dungeon Travelers 2 is simply getting further through the dungeons. Every expedition, you'll manage to get a bit further, perhaps even unlocking a shortcut allowing you to get to the new stuff more quickly next time you head in. Perhaps you'll beat a boss. Perhaps you'll find a nice piece of treasure. Perhaps you'll run into an area that has different enemies to the start of the dungeon. Point is, there's always something to discover, and while you're still wandering around grid-based mazes, swearing at one-way doors and teleporters and fighting battle after battle, at no point are you doing exactly the same thing over and over. You're not running the same dungeon time after time; you're discovering new parts of these sprawling mazes. You're not fighting the same bosses; you're taking on progressively more difficult challenges. And yes, you are grinding, but you're not doing so on a treadmill: you're always moving forwards.
This, I've come to the conclusion, is important to me, and it's why I'm not feeling the MMO thing right now. It's also why I've repeatedly bounced off the Souls series, despite trying to like them several times: those games are so heavily based on learning through repetition that I quickly get frustrated with the lack of forward momentum and tend to put them down after being smacked off a cliff by an armoured douchebag with a hammer for the umpteenth time, only to get smacked off a different cliff by a different armoured douchebag with a hammer on the way to reclaim my hard-earned souls and effectively undo the potential for progression I had before the unfortunate incident.
Nah. Give me a constant feeling of moving forward; that's what I really crave from my RPGs these days. And Dungeon Travelers 2 is very much scratching that particular itch right now.
