Sometimes I have to feel like the team is calling me out specifically when it comes to Final Fantasy XIV‘s live letters. After some back-and-forth speculation, this live letter just said outright that this is the wrap-up to the Dawntrail storyline, just like normal, we’re not going until 7.5. This does not surprise me, but I do appreciate that it was just stated as a matter of fact so that we can move on without really hemming and hawing over what the lack of a trial series might mean in the larger sense.
Spoiler warning: It just means that there’s no trial series, which was already kind of a relic for reasons we’ve talked about before. The end!
Of course, there was a lot else going on in this particular live letter that’s worth talking about, and that’s outside of the parts that also feel pretty much like a given. New dungeon, new trial, so far so donuts. Are we going to wrap up this story? Yes. Do we know if that means Calyx is a one-patch wonder of an antagonist? We should be so lucky. Let’s talk about something else.
The fact that the second major Vana’diel raid is named after San d’Oria is, at least to me, somewhat surprising. It’s not a complaint by any stretch of the imagination, mind you; I love San d’Oria, but I really didn’t expect that if we didn’t start in one of the main capital cities we’d get another one. That doesn’t mean we’re going to stay there, of course; after all, the first walk in Jeuno featured one Jeuno boss (and it was more about the Dynamis version), so it’s very clear we’ll be going elsewhere. Still, I had expected Whitegate or something similar.
I also think it’s interesting that we’ve been told that there is going to be another stage of the Phantom Weapon questline, but at least right now we have not been told anything about what we will be doing for that stage. We know that the northern part of the zone is coming in 7.5, and we know that more Phantom Jobs will be coming in 7.4. But that still means that 7.3 as of yet does not have a clearly defined thing to do for our weapon enhancements. The only new content that we know is coming in 7.3 is the Deep Dungeon that appears to be in Il Mheg.
There are, I think, a couple of possibilities. First of all, it’s possible that the second stage of relic upgrades will just be a tome sink without an accompanying grind. This might sound a touch odd, and it would be, but it’s worth noting that the Resistance weapon quests actually didn’t touch on the Bozjan Southern Front until the second step. Second, it’s possible that the Deep Dungeon will be involved; this seems unlikely to me, since that’s leveling content that is happening on a whole other reflection, but it is possible.
Third, we could see this stage require a trip or two into the Forked Tower. I think this is possible but it would be a bit odd; the developers seem to have set the Forked Tower up very much as a secondary challenge objective, not a mandatory part of the zone, and while this gives people time to catch up it would be weird. And the third possibility is just that it doesn’t tie into the Crescent at all or new content but just has a wholly separate grind.
My first guess would, in fact, be that this is going to tie in with variant dungeons, which we haven’t yet heard anything about. We know that we’ll get more phantom jobs in 7.4, though, and it it would make a certain amount of sense if those jobs came and were used in that particular content, since the system is right there. But I suspect that if we were getting that in 7.3, we would have heard about that alongside the deep dungeon.
As for the deep dungeon itself… it looks fine. I hope it’s less annoying than Eureka Orthos. The strengths and weaknesses of this particular style of content are now well-known, but Orthos tweaked a little bit too far into irritation to really satisfy a lot of folks (myself included). Its status as the best leveling content is unlikely to return, though, so we’ll have to wait and see at this point.
What’s really baffling to me is seeing that we’re getting Yok Huy as crafting quests for the allied society. This is not a complaint; I’ve said multiple times that I love the Yok Huy and am eager to get more content based around them. Seems absolutely riveting. It just seems like an odd pull, although it also makes the combat series feel even more like a complete nothing. At least we’re still getting to hang out with the Yok Huy, though.
Speaking of things we didn’t hear about, though, the silence about Beastmaster leaves me fairly confident that we’re not getting that with this patch. It’s possible we’ll get our Blue Mage update with this patch, though; there’s always a certain amount of stuff we don’t hear about during the first patch, and while it would make some amount of sense to group the two together, there’s no specific reason to do so. Chalk that up as another element in the question mark category.
Also, more Cosmic Exploration, which is… fine, I suppose, but it doesn’t seem to have really lit the fanbase on fire. Ironically, it feels like Cosmic Exploration’s sanding off of the rough edges from Ishgardian Restoration was a good decision but doesn’t attract the same kind of fervor, and it doesn’t have the laid-back fun of island sanctuaries. At least it does mean there are crafting tools to pursue now, that’s something.
Probably some of my rather neutral response is from being up uncomfortably early to watch the full rundown as it was happening, but on a whole I didn’t find myself as excited about this letter just because the most exciting elements (conclusions to the story arc, for example) are things that aren’t being talked about or even really teased yet. Do I expect to have thoughts about the Meso Terminal when it arrives? Absolutely. Is there much to say about it with the only thing we know being that it’s called the Meso Terminal and it will almost certainly be located in Living Memory? Not as such, no. I’m interested to see where these developments go, but there’s scant little information to predict where they go.
That doesn’t mean that it’s not going to work well, just that it’s hard to speculate much until it’s live or we know more from the next letter. C’est la vie.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to [email protected]. Next week, I’m going to talk about something that I think is gently noteworthy that I speculated about before the expansion but is increasingly being borne out when it comes to how completely Endwalker marked a wrap-up with the lands that players had previously explored.
The Nymian civilization hosted an immense amount of knowledge and learning, but so much of it has been lost to the people of Eorzea. That doesn’t stop Eliot Lefebvre from scrutinizing Final Fantasy XIV each week in Wisdom of Nym, hosting guides, discussion, and opinions without so much as a trace of rancor.