The Bozjan Front is lousy, lazy content

[TeraRamis]

...and yet I wouldn't be surprised if they spent a fair bit of development capital designing it. Honestly, my complaints about the zone are pretty much wholesale:

• It's just FATE grinding by another name. Except, of course, that these FATEs are spread far apart, you cannot fly, and the map itself is clearly designed to frustrate rapid movement. I know that you can (and should) get the item that buffs mount speed slightly, and - were the terrain itself designed well - I wouldn't even miss flight. It's simply that this isn't particularly good ground for ripping right along at a good clip.
  
  
• Speaking of ground, it's ugly - so ugly that I cannot understand was the Bozjans are fighting for, precisely. This doesn't appear to be, like, no man's land between two lines - it's not, say, the trenches of WWI (which were exceedingly desolate strips of desolate mud tucked between otherwise fertile and still-productive farmland). It's like the whole of Bozja is just... oil-drenched, magitek-infested ruins. And, at that point, I literally do not understand what people are fighting for. Moreover, from the perspective of a purely gaming experience, this feels a bit too much like mini Torghast and mini Argus all over again - IE, why am I spending so much time locked in a little piece of very ugly terrain? YMMV (and will vary, of course), but with so much beauty to be had in FFXIV, it sucks to spend hours wiling away my time in a hell cauldron.
  
  
• There are too many systems. And yes, you learn (or should learn) what they all do rather quickly. But it leads to a constant stream of questions in shout chat relating to how the zone functions which frankly shouldn't be there. There should be one currency; you shouldn't have to go see the officer every time you need to level up; the menu should be better explained by the game than it is. I get the feeling that a lot of people dip a toe into BF and immediately recoil because it just looks to convoluted, and that's a shame, since the rewards are pretty decent (and we could use the bodies).
  
  
• It's just boring. There are too few encounters, and those encounters produce the same experiences again and again. There are enemies everywhere, but unless you're actively grinding the stupid clusters, those enemies are merely a nuisance that disrupt movement. Things get slightly more interesting when you reach level 10 and move onto the dungeon, etc., but I can never really shake the feeling like I'm playing a poor-man's, non-PvP version of Guild Wars 2's RVR... like, it's just a ruinous, non-competitive, anonymous slog.

Sorry. As I said, YMMV. But I don't think this was a particularly excellent addition to FFXIV.

[Clover_Blake]

I had a great time in Bozja myself and I found it far from "lazy" (quite the opposite). This is a subjective matter.

[Hysterior]

Took me a lot of time to get into it (went in when patch was live then never got back to it until a couple of month ago) because I also found the area VERY UGLY.
But there is some good content locked behind this area unfortunately so I still recommend plowing through.

[GrizzlyTank]

The bosses are great, everything else is unfortunately too stale.

Large open areas with no thing notable going on, with generic fates.

[Ranaku]

I mean all the engagements and the raids and all that i kinda like but the aesthetics...bozja is the most ugly zone i have ever seen and i know it is a battlefield but heck it's really really bad.

Feels like they can get only one part right at the same time, Eureka was beautiful...Bozja has better mechanics and especially no light farm...xD

Now we just hope they find a way to let Eureka and Bozja come together and we get the perfect relic grind in Endwalker...hopefully...

[TeraRamis]

I mean all the engagements and the raids and all that i kinda like but the aesthetics...bozja is the most ugly zone i have ever seen and i know it is a battlefield but heck it's really really bad.

Feels like they can get only one part right at the same time, Eureka was beautiful...Bozja has better mechanics and especially no light farm...xD

Now we just hope they find a way to let Eureka and Bozja come together and we get the perfect relic grind in Endwalker...hopefully...

I wouldn't have minded the aesthetics at all if it wasn't JUST an open pit. If there was a 'front line' and then, like, forest and hamlets scattered on either side, with baggage trains, etc. moving to the trenches, that would have been really cool. But it's just nothing but wasteland.

[IckeDerTyp]

War huh, what is it good for? Absolutely, nothing~

[LisSquid]

Critical engagements are great! Everything else is lackluster. I'm really over fate farming.

Seeing all the raid bosses and meme enemies, like the red chocobo, pop up as remixed encounters feels fresh and so very good. Need a lot more of that and a lot less of mindless aoe spam.

[Ranaku]

I mean if it wants to be a warzone...the last dungeon of Stormblood showed exactly how it could look like.

[Absurdity]

I mean if it wants to be a warzone...the last dungeon of Stormblood showed exactly how it could look like.

That's actually a good point, Ghimlyt Dark looks significantly more interesting than Bozja does, despite both being "just warzones".


But besides that I just don't see all that much reason for the zone itself to exist. You're just running around a visually uninteresting wasteland, doing activities that you've been doing for years already, to acquire arbitrary currency for rewards that could've just as easily been put into other content.


The raids are nice, not gonna deny that, and with raids I mean CLL and DR, can't say much about Dalriada atm. I actually like the idea of the party splitting up to complete separate objectives or environmental hazards, the normal alliance raids could use some more of that variety.
But those raids would've been just as good without Bozja as a zone even existing. You could just as easily put all the rewards into the 3 raids, delete the zone and not much of value would be lost.