My Long Overdue Eureka Topic

[Aster_E]

Combat, Development, and Story

Just so everyone reading this knows, I had to take some ibuprofen for my head so I can even begin to type this without feeling like my cranium’s going to explode. Square’s writing when it comes to story has always ranged from all sorts of bad to ridiculously good. The story to Eureka teeters between mediocre and pointless.

I’ll let you guess which of these I find to be garbage, and which I find to be on the better side of the spectrum.

For those of you who skip the story, or those of you who didn’t but also didn’t quite catch what happened, here’s the gist of it. We’re flagged down and asked to help investigate a mysterious island. Krile and another Lala, a right asshole of one, suspect it to be the place where they went to school together, but they went and called the island something else instead – Eureka. Gerolt is told to tag along because the story writing team, and by extension Rowena the queen of greedy, slave-driving bitches, decided he hasn’t paid his damn bar tab. We get there, it’s Sharlayan confirmed, and we’re told to go look in general locations (without markers) for the source of aetheric disturbances.

The areas of Anemos and Pagos are allegedly ruled by demons, who in no way impact the story other than to show up when we beat up night time mobs, wait for the right time or weather, and sacrifice enough Lalas Allagan fish genetically infused with popoto batter. If I may deviate from this a moment, I like how the Pazuzu in FFXIV resembles the one from Mystic Quest far more than the generic ogre-like demon that was XI’s Pazuzu. Louhi is even more detached from Pagos, as he apparently shows up from another dimension and decides to test his blades on you since you’re basically the first living being he sees.

Then again, Pagos’ story is where the story goes from barely setting you on the path to “Uhh… wha?” You’re sent out to more disturbances, but the magicite are complete and utter duds. Then you’re told to find the next thing with which to transfer to the next Eureka, and you find a geyser stream of endless aether shooting into the sky.

Meanwhile, you periodically meet a robed figure who goes around mumbling a bunch of words, just words! He’s doing something with the island that is unclear. Then he meets the asshole Lala, offers him(?) power, and then exclaims that HE IS EUREKA! (To be continued, if you haven’t facedesked your brain into oblivion at this point)

Now then, in Anemos, we level from one to twenty. The established game feature of riding on our mounts is taken away, for reasons, until we complete the quest at level seventeen, and, even then, it is the slow mount speed so many of us are used to before flight became a thing in Heavensward, as opposed to the boosted speeds we were introduced to in Stormblood (allegedly as a result of PS3 support ending so no more limitations?). We find, pick up, and put to use five magecite to power our conveniently gifted Magia Boards.

First we have to level, however. Here is the first major hurdle that Anemos faced on Day One. The accessibility to this effect is kind of crap. You need to find the first protean crystal while combatting monsters your level or higher. The monsters are hard to solo when you are not ready for them, which may or may not involve utilizing a job that not everyone has leveled; and the other jobs are basically screwed out of the solo experience for the vast majority of players. Note that I said the vast majority, you know, the casual and common populace of the game’s player base, not the super elite for whom this content wasn’t exactly advertised.

It was rough on Day One when there were so many people trying out the area and raging over the required play style. You see, the speed of FFXIV’s combat, though not the fastest, doesn’t work well with damage spongey monsters that you have to kill quickly for chains. A ton of people were ready to swear Eureka off entirely, or perhaps some already did. Within the day something the devs did not foresee or intend happened. I will bring this up again soon.

Now then, Notorious Monsters can be spawned by beating up so many monsters, or beating up monsters, and oh yeah! There’s the one that requires beating up a ton of monsters. FFXI did Notoroious monsters better by having more variety as to how to spawn or trigger those fights in the world. Already, if you have read all that I said up to this point, you might suspect a pattern where the lion’s share of elements from FFXI present in Eureka are either downplayed if it’s good, or turned up to, well, XI when it’s not so good of a design choice. Meanwhile, so much Diadem is also present. Beat up Notorious Monsters, open the lockboxes they drop, shut your brain off as you try to progress. Unlike Diadem, however, the Notorious Monsters of Eureka do not count towards FATEs in achievements, nor do they event count towards the NM slayer achievements. You just get Lockboxes, Anemos Crystals, and, in the case of Pazuzu, special feathers to finish off the last step of the Anemos phase of the not-yet relic weapons.

Oh, whoops, after all that time, the weapons still are not relics. For that matter, the weapons we finished with were i355, and the armor 350, when we could already get higher than that from tomestones or raids. You see, back in “A Realm Reborn,” the relics were not only on time with new content but were also relevant in item level. In “Heavensward,” the relic patches were halfway between content patches, but usually managed to remain relevant to the content as we ran it anew. At least the Anemos weapons and gear had five open meld slots and could be earned so quickly that it barely mattered at this point.

It gets “better.” An instance holds up to 144 people in it. Anyone who has done the 24-man raids with their settings turned up, or done the Hunts on populated servers, can tell you how well the game handles the load. Anyone who farms Suzaku Extreme can also tell you about the server latency. Additionally, anyone capable of measuring the game servers’ ping can tell you that, here in the US, more than half of it comes from the data centers’ Service Provider. So what do you get when you combine these things into a single brawl of a hundred or more poor souls against a Notorious monster whose mechanics can be summed up to “dodge this aoe telegraph?” You get player character corpses that slide and jump all over the place. You get people taking damage from stuff they’re not even touching by a ridiculous distance away. You get people turning down in-and-out-of-party effects, and still somehow getting screwed over by the game’s spaghetti code or server ticks. At least we don’t have to sneak past anything sound-based that will eat our faces in a fraction of a second if we fail. Oh, right (more later).

The lockboxes, when they came out in Diadem, and all the way up to a month or so into Anemos being live, took so long to open, and there were so, so many of them that we got. Glamour could not, at the time, be sold on the market board, and that was updated in time for the market to immediately crash since everyone had the Anemos gear who wanted it. The same could be said of the demand for minions plummeting fast while the supply only went higher and higher. Anemos crystals can be traded in for Protean Crystals after the first quest is completed that leads you to Gerolt, hard at work at hardly denting his debt to Rowena; however, we had to trade them in one at a time instead of the improved numbers we got weeks later. Truly, it could be argued that Anemos lacked play testing.

Attention, Square Enix. Hi, I know you hate play testing, but I know you also hate having to go back and fix stuff. Ask yourself something, though. Would it cost you more time and money to have someone actually test your content for feasibility, in regards to time and energy spent by your average player to do one simple action, or would it cost you more to do as you’re doing now with having to fix stuff so often? You promised so much new content this expansion, but you have spent so much time fixing or updating things like Shiro housing + housing ward increases, Glam dressers, and Fashion Report requirements, that it shines a light on the lack of play testing as an issue. Thank you for reading this side tangent.

Before I step into the Pagos side of this experience, it’s high time that I address the elephant in the room.

Not exactly what I meant, but it’s actually fairly close.

Yoshi P’s team did not intend for the train to happen. We were even punished for it in Pagos, instead of the hard questions being asked that honestly should have been explored. Here in the English speaking countries, people gathered at the spawning points Notorious Monsters. In Japan, people waited in the main hub for the NM to spawn. Chain parties dwindled to basically nil. People leveled with the NMs and gained so many crystals that our weapon and gear for one job, maybe more, was covered by the time we got to receive rewards from Pazuzu. To put it bluntly, no one wanted to play the game as it was designed.

That is not the fault of we the players. It should never have been taken out on we the players. Our fault was realizing we could run together around the zone in any order of spawning points, socialize with one another, go ballistic with our puns, work on our resurrection achievements, cheer one another on, and bear witness to additional monsters coming along and wrecking people who are either just standing at the waiting spot, or people fighting a NM (eg., the water snakes by the dinosaur NM). The whole situation did need an address and to be handled in a proper way. Sadly . . .

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