Well, I was kind of right. I thought the next expansion of Final Fantasy 14 would involve going to all of the reflections (broken-apart pieces of a once-unified world) of FF14’s near-universe and doing the work of reuniting them/assimilating the broken worlds left behind by the series’ villains in the first few expansions (the Ascians). And while that might STILL be true, it seems like the next expansion is focused on one of them specifically and this whole next arc of expansions might be doing what I thought a single expansion would. So, yeah, I was kind of right. I just thought it might involve a bit more bopping around rather than picking a specific new place to go and having the whole adventure there. That, plus everything from the new patch content (all five missions of it) has me pretty excited for what all this might bring. Watching the presentation at the US Fan Fest and then playing through the new story content is really building up something interesting that is both pretty much what I expected and still feels new and exciting to me. It is going to be a long way, of about nine months, to before the expansion actually drops, but I’ve got plenty of stuff left to do before then (and rest to get, of course) so I’m not terribly worried about the wait.
Between all of the new locations they showed via mostly concept art, the systems they showed us, and the revamped combat systems they’re going to debut, this next expansion promises to be a significant change in the game. A lot of the combat jobs have had their buttons reworked to combine things, to bring effects together under a single action, to make situational abilities share a button when their situations never overlap, and to combine things done from multiple button presses for a combo to a single button pressed multiple times. Mega combos are still possible of course, but everything is going to work a little different thanks to the rework and the shift away from the 2-minute cycle that has hampered the dev team. Turns out needing to design fights around this 2-minute cycle everyone relies on for their damage bursts is incredibly difficult and quickly leaves the combat encounters feeling stale. As one of the combat designers pointed out during the fan fest, the 2-minute burst means that there needs to be places for the boss to stand around and get hit so that the players can deal damage during their window. Sure, they don’t always literally do that, but the nature of cooldowns and timers and all that means that the boss has to be availble for everyone to constantly whale on during that window so long as the party is timing things well. It’ll be interesting to see how combat encounters change once they remove the cycle and have a bit more freedom.
Beyond that, the way they’re changing a lot of the systems that make up the weekly gameplay loop look interesting. I’m intrigued by the idea that they’ll move from a daily system to a weekly one. It would definitely fit into my schedule a little better, but I generally don’t have problems getting my stuff done at present so I’m clearly not the audience for this feature. I don’t really do other stuff most weeks, so I can do just about as much daily stuff as I’d like, but I imagine that a lot of people will appreciate this change. I’m more interested in how this new reward system builds into other things. They talked about new action glamours, ways to customize your character more and more by changing how they preform attacks, and suggested those might be a part of the weekly reward system. That, plus some of the stuff on the mockup we saw, makes me think a lot of existing collection and grinding systems are going to be wrapped up into this change, but it’s hard to say for sure since it’s quite possible that it was all placeholder stuff. Time will tell, of course, but I will say right now that I’m very curious to see how it all changes and to try out all the new systems.
As interested as I am about all of this, I’ll admit that I’m also a little trepidatious. Final Fantasy 14 has been my main timesink for seventeen months now and while I think it’s moving in a good direction, I am far from immune to the general fear of change. I’m usually quick to embrace it, but this is such a big part of my life that I’m nervous that I won’t like the changes enough that it will force me out of the game. I don’t think that’ll happen, but I can’t quite silence the fear that everything I like about the game is going to disappear in the change. I mean, they showed off one of my primary combat jobs and it is VERY different from how it is now in ways that change the general flow of how it performs and they’re doing SOMETHING still rather unknown with the tanks, by splitting them formally into Main Tanks and Off Tanks (which is currently a set of terms used to designate the roles performed in combat, not a reflection of how related jobs work). They gave almost no details about this split, so it could be a good thing, it could be a bad thing, or it could merely be a largely cosmetic differentiation like the various types of DPS. No one knows yet and it will likely be a while before we know. There’s just so many unknowns that it’s difficult to relax and enjoy the anticipation. I’ll be fine, I’m already mostly over it by the time I’m writing this a week and a half after fan fest (I’m really behind on my blog posts), but that little kernal of fear remains and likely will until I can try things out. After all, different doesn’t automatically mean “bad,” just not the same as it used to be. Maybe it’ll even be better, the way everyone seems to want to believe. I want to believe that too, but I’m just a little more hesitant to commit to it.