Final Fantasy 14 director and producer Naoki "Yoshi-P" Yoshida believes that the MMO has a problem in how it balances providing content for ultra-casual players, ultra-hardcore raid fiends, and all those fans in between, and given the response to recent content, it's safe to say much of the community feels the same way. Yoshi-P says a design philosophy change is in order, and we'll start to see some of that new approach take shape in 7.35's new Deep Dungeon.
As Yoshi-P notes in the latest Letter from the Producer live stream, Final Fantasy 14 tends to get casual content in odd-numbered patches, and hardcore content in even-numbered updates. Yoshida says that, in the wake of player feedback, he's been doing "a lot of thinking" about what kind of player will enjoy these types of content.
"We have so much content in FF right now," Yoshi-P says, via the fan translations at the excellent unofficial FF14 Discord. "But for someone who doesn't do savage, an even patch might bring 0 content. When we're adding 10 sorts of new content, hardcore players might enjoy 3 of them, casual players might enjoy 3, allrounders maybe 4-6. It's rare to have someone who enjoys all 10."
For Yoshida, "a design philosophy change I want to get into is to show how there are different ways to enjoy the same content, in a casual way or in a more hardcore way." While he acknowledges that "both sides need their own extremes," he hopes that the new Deep Dungeon can offer something for everyone.
That Deep Dungeon, called Pilgrim's Traverse, is once again a roguelike-style mode where you try to climb all the way up a 100-floor dungeon to fight a big boss at the end. Pilgrim's Traverse offers more checkpoints than previous Deep Dungeons – this time you'll be able to restart from floors 31, 51, and 71 – and the devs aim to more cleanly spread the difficulty throughout the floors, too.
But the most notable changes are to how you engage with the final boss. Once you reach floor 99, you'll unlock the option to fight the boss in a standalone duty, which Yoshi-P likens to a "practice" battle that'll still drop "some" rewards. Beating this version of the boss won't count as a full clear of Pilgrim's Traverse, but it will give you a chance to build up your skills against the boss.
The boss also comes in a Quantum version, which you spend offerings to battle. Offerings come in five types, and each boosts the boss's stats in various ways. That means you can essentially choose the boss's difficulty, and the exact ways that difficulty expands, by which offerings you put down.
Importantly, those offerings are only consumed once you defeat the boss, so there's no penalty for a bad run.
Exactly how well this all works in practice remains to be seen, as patch 7.3 doesn't land until August 5, and it'll be a bit longer before the 7.35 follow-up lets us fight through Pilgrim's Traverse.
But Yoshida's been talking up the variable difficulty of the new Deep Dungeon for some time, so here's hoping it manages to find the right balance for all types of players.
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