Can someone ELI5 the difference between Criterion and Variant dungeons?

[Stormfur]

I understand that one can be any class and it's not beholden to tank/healer/2 dps, and that there's a savage version of..criterion? But I'm not really clear on the difference between them or what they do exactly. Can anyone explain like I'm 5?

[Mikey_R]

Variant dungeons are the easy mode. 1-4 players, any party composition and you get a choice of different variant actions dependant on role to make up for any missing ones, if any (eg, there is a defensive variant action and a healing variant action etc.). There are different paths you can go down which affect the dungeon and boss in different ways.

Criterion Dungeons are the harder versions. You have to enter as a team of 1 tank, 1 healer and 2 DPS, you get no additional actions and reviving is limited to Variant Raise 2, which has limited uses. Your route is predetermined as well. There are 2 levels of Criterion Dungeon, the easier one and the savage difficulty. Whilst the easier Criterion dungeon will allow you to use the matchmaking feature, Criterion savage will not.

That is the very basics of it.

[Packetdancer]

So far as I can tell, Variant Dungeons are basically like little Choose Your Own Adventure stories you can do on your own or with friends; you get to make choices along the way, and those choices determine the path the storyline of the encounter takes.

Criterion Dungeons are basically saying you want the Choose Your Own Adventure books where 80% of the possible choices ended with you dying in some horrible manner. (I honestly cannot wait.)

[znushu]

It's basically Adventures from Wildstar but trimmed down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphgBVtf2HA

[Tlamila]

In addition to what others said, note that the Criterion dungeons version called normal is actually also Savage. In the LL they said that the boss equal savage floors 1.5, 3 and 4. The savage difficulty seems to be more like ultimate, and is said to be "for those who clear savage tier ready and are well geared from it".

Also, in Variant dungeons you have an npc accompany you, which is part of its story. A very cute and famous npc in this case.

[Jeeqbit]

Variant dungeons are the normal/story version that you can do with a varying number of players, including solo and go through different paths.

Criterion dungeons are the extreme version where you can be matched in duty finder.

Savage criterion dungeons are, well, the savage versions and you would want a pre-formed party for them.

So you can think of it as normal, extreme and savage like we have for trials and raids.

[Packetdancer]

It's basically Adventures from Wildstar but trimmed down
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iphgBVtf2HA

I started to say exactly that and then thought "most of the forum may not know what I mean if I reference Adventures" so I wrote the Choose Your Own Adventure analogy instead.

But man, I miss Adventures; that was a neat system.

[znushu]

But man, I miss Adventures; that was a neat system.

they were but the developers killed the system itself by making leveling faster and by not increasing the rewards for the system or even questing.
people only really played through adventures in like the first few months and after that and the few years of the game that followed adventures were 100% dead.



the same will happen in this game too as players in-game today are not running older content as much anymore.
infact many time you can find yourself stuck in hour long queues, I seen and heard many reports on this happening to alot of players for sometime now.
so it will be interesting to see how SE solves this issue but I suspect they'll just use events and quests that require you to run through it like they have been doing already with existing 'dead' content ingame.

[Packetdancer]

they were but the developers killed the system itself by making leveling faster and by not increasing the rewards for the system or even questing.

Oh, believe me, I know.

My life was deeply entwined with that game for a while; I was somewhat infamously the only person in the closed beta allowed to admit to it for like nine months, because despite the NDA, Bitwise had outed me as a tester on the Carbine blog. (And like two weeks into the earliest beta, no less.) I seriously considered returning to game development professionally -- something I'd sworn not to do -- when there was a possibility of going to work at Carbine.

WildStar remains near and dear to my heart even now... and I am deeply, painfully aware of the numerous mistakes that were made.

people only really played through adventures in like the first few months and after that and the few years of the game that followed adventures were 100% dead.

I mean, I think the issue was that people explored all the paths very, very quickly and eagerly... but the rewards were (as you noted) not proportional to the time investment, so once they'd seen all the possibilities they stopped running them.

And while I think the more casual players might have kept Adventures active in the longer run as they got there at a more leisurely pace... there were also some decisions made which alienated and chased away a lot of the casual playerbase, making that prospect a non-starter.

Given that FFXIV has a larger base of players who consume content at a more leisurely rate than some of us, I hope that problem will be mitigated here... especially since this is four-man content; getting together a light party is much easier than gathering appropriately-sized groups for most of the niche content that SQEX has introduced before.

But even if it isn't and the group activity drops off, they've evidently at least ensured the normal Variants can be done solo, meaning people won't be blocked from experiencing the story even if they can't find a group. And that should help avoid the issues that cropped up with the Bozja duties, where people stopped running CLL in the first zone by the time Zadnor came out, and then the stragglers caught up and had trouble getting enough people together to get through it and get to Delubrum, much less to Zadnor.