My Review of Pagos: An Uninspired Disappointment

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Now that I have experienced Pagos for several lockouts, I wanted to write out my initial impressions. I’ll preface this “review” of sorts by openly acknowledging they aren’t positive. If you enjoy Eureka: Pagos, all the power to you. I wish I could be you; truly I do. I want to enjoy this content. I simply... don’t.

Anywho! Let’s begin.

Pagos is, quite frankly, one of the most mind-numbingly boring experiences I have had whilst playing FFXIV since starting my adventure near Heavensward’s launch. Never before have I awoken to a patch upon release and a few hours thereafter considered playing a different game. Three hours and my wrist physically hurt from the sheer abundance of Blood Demons and Worms multiple groups and I slaughtered in hopes of spawning a Notorious Monster. We were greeted by Ash Dragon eventually, which I thought “Okay. This is awesome! Maybe it’ll pick up now!” It didn’t as an hour passed and we timed out before ever seeing Glavoid.

Friends and acquaintances across various discord cited similar results—some claiming to have gone entire three hour lockouts with only two or three Notorious Monster spawns. And this was day three. I appreciate even Anemos had a slow start. I was there, at release, grinding. Unless my memories fails me, I don’t recall it being this bad.

While supposedly working as intended; grinding mobs is, apparently, the purpose of Eureka. I cannot fathom how that is good design. If I am to be frank, FFXIV possesses lackluster combat due to its extremely rigid structure. Fortunately, this aspect is routinely masked through mechanics—the actual engaging part of combat.

Pagos highlights precisely the opposite.

Trash mobs are devoid of anything beyond the most basic attack patterns and pose little to no threat unless people are needlessly careless. They do nothing whereas Notorious Monsters offer the mechanical variation seen in 24 man raids, dungeons, Trials and other content. They may not be quite as ambitious, but they still provide a degree of nuance which helps alleviate the monotony of endlessly pulling the same monster for the 500th time.

In layman's terms, Ash Dragon is cool. Blood Demons are boring. Five hundred Blood Demons are soul crushing.

What should be the highlight; the driving force that makes killing mobs worth all the hassle, isn’t. Those Notorious Monsters are essentially an afterthought; nuts sprinkled on ice cream gone sour. In an odd manner, Pagos feels almost... punishing somehow. The sheer commitment required simply isn't validated by what rewards await. At best, I am bored and little else, which is not how a new patch ought to feel.

Not once have I contemplated walking away from a piece of content FFXIV offers. I have multiple Animas done, I went back and did Zodiac relics, I have almost every PotD weapon, I have cleared floors 200 and 100 of each Deep Dungeon, respectively. I have cleared Savage multiple times and am progging Ultima. I even have the Whisper-A-Go-Go.

I have grinded in this game, and enjoyed a good portion of it despite some frustration along the way. But Pagos is where I finally ask myself “Is this worth it? Is it worth even bothering?” When leveling a third and fourth alt simultaneously, or simply moving on to another game until 4.4 comes around both sound more appealing. I have to wonder is it just me? Is Pagos simply not my kind of content? Perhaps. I certainly cannot speak for everyone. But that doesn’t speak fondly to the content when anything else grabs my attention more.

Maybe this all becomes a moot point in a week or two. I certainly hope so.


Now to combat frequent rebuttals before they even come up:

Pagos is optional content!

Unfortunately, it isn’t. Not if you want the relics. Previous steps allowed multiple avenues to progress. They may not have been efficient, however they remained an alternative. Even the often maligned Book phase at least has you partaking in different FATEs. While by no means a fun step, it lacked the same monotony of Pagos. There, I have precisely one choice. Kill thousands upon thousands of the same mobs until a Notorious Monster finally spawns. Maybe.

Hours of a dull grind rewarded with ten minutes of fun.

You simply want things handed to you!

I want to be entertained. Killing the aforementioned thousands of mindless trash mobs with no mechanics is simply not my idea of entertainment. If I wanted that, I could spam dungeons. At least then I’m interrupted by a boss every 5-10 minutes. Or I could elect to play Black Desert or Blade and Soul—both of which do the Korean grind better.

This is meant to be like FFXI

If I wanted a rendition of FFXI, I would play FFXI. Now I can only speak from hearsay as I never played that game, however many have highlighted content like Eureka and other aspects since lifted were implemented far better in FFXI than their FFXIV interpretation.

Well, I think Pagos is awesome!

I’m glad. Please respect the fact I don’t. And as this is a thread where I share my thoughts, they will be subjective in that regard. Like I said above, I wish I could enjoy it the way you do.

What would you change then?

That depends. In the short term, I would request Notorious Monster spawns demands be drastically reduced. Nerf their EXP if need be while perhaps buffing mob kill EXP. The former remains relevant due to crystals, but the fun aspect of fighting giant internet dragons stays intact.

In the long term, I would prefer a tiered system where you kill trash mobs that spawn a mini-boss of sorts. This boss would be exclusive to your party, thus preventing other players from stealing credit. While nothing overwhelming per se, these mini-bosses would have mechanics to keep things interesting. And upon parties killing enough of them, that is what spawns the Notorious Monster. Or perhaps take it a step bigger and bring back the one aspect of Diadem that proved fun: Emergency Missions.

All of this is, of course, brainstorming on the fly. Certain things would need to be adjusted, such as a potential EM not being ruined by one player. Regardless, the purpose would be highlighting boss encounters. That’s when FFXIV Is at its best.

[Miste]

I was hoping they would put daily quests inside Eureka from the NPCs at the base camp or something that give some EXP. The challenge log is a nice start, but it is only a weekly and doesn't really keep you interested long imo.

They could just let you take on maybe 3-5 daily quests per day that have different stuff that lets you explore certain points of the map to pick up artifacts or something and/or could kill a certain amount of mobs and get some exp from the mob kills and extra when you turn in the daily quest.

Like they should make it less one dimensional...need more variety of things to do in there. If people want to make grind parties then they can, but there should be a few more options for people to choose from even if it is not very fast EXP either.

Gathering could also be a thing maybe?

[Rockette]

I was thinking about it this morning and I think one of the biggest differences between this Stormblood relic compared to HW and ARR is that you cannot embark on this journey alone. You absolutely must party find, from level 1 to level 35 in Eureka and every one of those levels is the same exact thing.

ARR and HW, your quest was a little more personal, everyone could hit it at different speeds with a variety of quests to grind. It was more of a personal progress.

Does that makes sense? I'm tired.

Also I'm salty there is no blacklist in Pagos. Lord, the shout chat, pls.

[MomomiMomi]

Since you mentioned Emergency Missions, there was content in FFXI that was somewhat similar to it: Walk of Echoes.

There's a huge difference here, though. Whereas Emergency Missions were just a single battle, Walk of Echoes was 15 different battlefields. You could enter them whenever you wanted (up to 36 players) and initiate the battle once you felt you had enough people. It would then lock the battlefield, making it so no more players can enter. You could just spam these all day if you wanted as long as you had people to do them.

Emergency Missions, in contrast, were a single battle that happened once in a while without notice. Had they just scrapped the whole Diadem-now-Eureka idea and just made a Walk of Echoes style content of a whole bunch of different types of Emergency Missions, I would have applauded them. I suspect a lot of people would have.

[Elamys]

While I didn't really LIKE Anemos a lot it was at least kind of enjoyable. Certainly the NM spawns were frequent enough to keep me engaged.

Everything I've heard about Pagos makes me not want to even touch the quest to unlock it.

These don't feel like relic weapons. The ARR and HW relics had you participating in a multitude of content, doing different things. These are just like the tome weapons in how you obtain them, except instead of getting tomes for completing dungeons, you get "tomes" for killing the monsters. There's no challenge, and nothing fun. I'd take Umbrite again over this.

[Hestzhyen]

By all accounts it sounds like SE messed up with Pagos a bit.

They didn't like or intend the NM fate trains in Anemos... disregarding whether or not they should have seen that coming, it's fair enough for them to decide to "get it right" in Pagos. However instead of making the intended vision fun and engaging it seems like they decided to raise two middle fingers to the players. Way to go guys.

I did ARR and HW relic, I like grinds well enough. But I will sadly be skipping relics this time since Eureka is everything that old MMOs left behind for a reason with none of the fun that made up for it. Even worse, SE is doubling down on the player hate with each iteration...

[valho]

When they announce Pagos will be release I was pretty hype, since I only return to the game about 2 months ago, I did Anemos to get the SAM relic. Wasn't the most fun things to do but was bearable and the weapon was cool looking. Went into Pagos on patch there then realize ok, all the progress I have done in Anemos is pretty much gone, there is no sense of progress going from Anemos to Pagos, you are pretty much thrown right into grinding like a level 1. Spend about an hour or two there, with nothing to show except for 1 lvl, no crystal no nothing, wasted time doing the stupid bunny FATE that doesn't give XP. The carrot on the stick is not inticing enough for me to go back into Pagos again, I would rather spend those time playing something else.

[Fawkes]

This is meant to be like FFXI

If I wanted a rendition of FFXI, I would play FFXI. Now I can only speak from hearsay as I never played that game, however many have highlighted content like Eureka and other aspects since lifted were implemented far better in FFXI than their FFXIV interpretation.

I played a lot of FFXI, and have a lot of fond memories of it, but this isn't a good substitution. It's really only similar to the EXP grind, which was just something you had to do if you wanted to play the game at all. The fact that it was a tremendously slow grind wasn't something I would count as a positive.

If they wanted to copy FFXI then we should be killing mobs to get drops that pop NMs, and then killing those NMs to get pop items for higher-tier NMs. At least that would be copying actual content from FFXI and not just copying the monotony of FFXI.

[Rhaja]

The wife and I have completed about 4 lockouts in Pagos, and while I enjoy the mob grind in spurts I sincerely don't know if I'm going to be able to keep this up for a variety of reasons.

The first and most glaring is the timing of release. If this was at the start of the patch I wouldn't have the same issues with it. There would have been plenty of time to do this and still have some time with the weapon feeling like it was "on par" before the next patch and Ilvl increase. However in about a month we're going to see the introduction of new weapons, and at this rate most of us are going to only have the next step of the relic for about a week. On looking this is a bit demotivating as we can only assume it'll be near the end of the patch before the next upgrade, and once again it'll be near the time people can buy tome weapons. This weapon is in a really weird place as its consistantly behind in stat's and item level, and requires a very dedicated time requirement. Also this is me ignoring that their main competitor is releasing a Expansion next week and this bit of content is not exactly enticing.

Another major issue I have with this mode is the disconnect between the dev's and us. What made Anemos fun and/or tolerable for a vast majority of players was essentially Barrens Chat and the shared responsibility. Being in a crappy situation with a ton of players has lead to a lot of open chat that usually ends up bizzare and amusing. Also with 144 players all in the same spot you're not actually forced to constantly grind out mobs for exp. You can take a break, chat, make food, or whatever ytou need to and come back to progress being made. Yes it led to AFK abuse but you only really noticed that when spawning the NM's in really punishing areas. I'd go out on a limb and say only 3 out of 20 NM's we're inconvenienced by afk'ers. What I would like to see is them to either remove the lottery spawn completely and make NM's spawn from item pops, or just accept it and give a acceptable minimal amount of exp to any party that actually tags the mob.

As said before the NM's spawn rate is noticeably lower. Either this is intentional or they need to just outright state "You're missing a needed step. Try a new feature maybe?" if they want to keep the bit of mystery.

The combat in this game does not support this gameplay. As previously mentioned it's extremely rigid and only feels good when mixed with mechanics.

Lastly, and I feel this is important, is progression. There's a MASSIVE difference between farming mobs in either Eureka and in an older MMO; leveling up doesn't actually do anything. You get numerically stronger, thats it. We're not able to equip stronger gear found only in Eureka. We're not even getting more magicite (as far as I've seen, please tell me I'm wrong). You're just getting more durable. It's a very small detail but there's a feeling of enjoyment in knowing if you get a few more levels you can equip a piece of gear that's going to make your attacks stronger, faster, or specialized in any way.

All in all, as much as I loved Anemos and want to love Pagos, I'm currently leaning towards doing all of this after it gets nerfed. If at all. Did I have fun meeting people, doing the old school, and Fell Cleaving for hours? Yes. But then I see that this week I've put about 12hrs into a piece of side content, with very little progression, for a weapon that will never be on par until the last patch of the expansion because "reasons".

[Mesarthim]

I felt compelled to like the post before even reading it, and after having read it I am in agreement.

If they like... lowered mob HP and increased the exp they gave that's be one major step into making me like the content more. All it is now is a carpal tunnel simulator. My wrist got pretty bad in anemos (but at least NM trains broke the monotony).