Ragar looks back at FFXIV's launch and where we go from here

Patch 2.1: The Good, Bad and Ugly

Looking at the official page or the patch notes for patch 2.1, it looks fairly massive for a first patch to a new MMO: player housing, PvP, a new raid and dungeon, hard modes for existing content, daily quests and reputations, an aesthetician, treasure hunts, etc. The new patch also included quite a bit of UI redesign to clean up menus rather than adding more buttons to the list. For most MMOs we would usually see maybe one of those additional features in addition to new dungeons or raids, so this was a good sign of things to come. Of course there’s something to be said for trying too much at once…

While all of the features of patch 2.1 were things players asked for, the main attraction that Square Enix has been pushing since the days of beta is player housing. Patch 2.1 only brought housing for Free Companies, but many players viewed that as a great way to start: something to pool resources for and share since you could add crafting stations, decorations that gave you bonuses to crafting/gathering, show off trophies and more. When the prices for the various servers came out just before the patch went live, there was an uproar among many of the players including myself. FFXIV’s Producer/Director Naoki Yoshida replied to a forum thread about housing to try and explain the reasoning for both how high the prices were in general as well as why Legacy servers had to pay so much more than everyone else. Yoshida’s post was on page 60 of that thread – as of this writing, that thread is now on page 140 with over 170 thousand views. A similar thread on the Japanese forums is over 260 pages with 960 thousand views; clearly this is still a concern among players, especially as we can see similar issues in the near future.

2014 and FFXIV: What Does the Future Hold?

Patch 2.1 may have brought us FC housing, but that still leaves individual player housing further down the road. According to previous statements by developers in old interviews, our only guide for pricing on this is that a medium house should be “roughly three times the amount of Gil you make leveling a class from 1 to 50”. That sounds fine, but when we consider their reasoning behind the high prices for FC housing as well as their continual problems with having enough server capacity to provide housing to meet player demand, some players (myself included) are concerned that we’re going to see a repeat of what happened with FC housing once these other homes show up.

Moving on to other features, we’ve heard that further fights with the Primals are planned for the future, with names like Leviathan, Ramuh and Shiva getting thrown around as possibilities. Additional future updates include things like FCs being able to capture and summon other Primals for use somewhere, Chocobo farming, and the Gold Saucer with various mini-games for players to try their hands at. All of these sound like great additions to the game, but these are just tidbits out of developer interviews – what do we really want to see out of FFXIV as it moves into 2014?

Personally I want to see more class/job options start showing up in these patches. The developers have said they plan to add more of these as time goes on, but there’s a lot of ground to cover and quite a few previous Final Fantasy games to draw upon for inspiration. In particular I’d like to see them expand the job system to cover crafting and gathering classes as well. These are supposed to be full-fledged classes with progression systems, after all, and specialization is not unheard of in both of these areas. If 2014 brought me the option to specialize my Miner around his Sledgehammer and those associated nodes or perhaps focus my Armorer on infusing his pieces with the elements as a Fireforge Smith or something like that, I’d be ecstatic. Nothing permanent to be locked into, but these could be separate paths where you could focus on one to get that top recipe or super-rare material before everyone else or you could hit all of them and be a grandmaster of your craft.

Before I leave you all until January, what would you like to see in the world of Eorzea in 2014? Do you share my love for gathering and crafting? Focused on PvE and looking simply for more dungeons? PvPer hoping for more now that dueling and the Wolves’ Den have been added? Let us know in the comments. In the meantime, happy holidays and I’ll see everyone on the 7^th.

Michael “Ragar” Branham