Is FFXIV 2.1 the SE version of SWTOR 1.2?

In too many ways, FFXIV is resembling Star Wars: The Old Republic. A strong initial launch, decent content for the leveling process which keeps everyone interested for the first month or so, incentives to subscribe for longer periods of time, scrambling to fix lots of issues at launch... as well as canceling many things that were originally scheduled for launch, and the promise of a magical patch that with new content which will solve everyone's problems.

Some of the things the SWTOR 1.2 patch had included:
* A new super-hard operation that nobody could touch without doing months of grinding for gear
* New daily area designed to keep you logging in and playing every single day for a few months
* Small cosmetic buffs that didn't affect anything, but were fun

Unfortunately, SWTOR 1.2 also marked a very distinct end to interest in the game. Almost everyone I played with at the time tried out the new content, found it inaccessible without a massive grind. Most people saw that the grind was clearly laid out in a mindless, very obvious attempt to keep you subscribing and quit shortly after 1.2 was released. Will this be what happens to FFXIV 2.1?

(Warning: Some mild spoilers may follow in the pictures... very mild though!)

The Good
SE has been usually been good at story and humor. Patch 1.2 gives us a few more main story quests, changes the world slightly and very clearly sets up the next stage for the next part of the story-line. The main story quests is what gives me the biggest hope for the long-term... I wouldn't say success... but at least it has a chance for holding my interest for enough time for them to put in more gameplay content. If they come up with this amount of story or more every 3 months, it will probably have my curiosity long enough for them to come out with an expansion pack. (Hey! I played FFXI: WotG until everything came out... and that took 3 years!)

The scions are back together! Yay!

I think this staff may be important. The only show it every other cutscene!

Yay! Re-visiting familiar faces!

More mysterious robed people... let me guess... this one is... a mind-possessed CID! (That, or this is Assassin's Creed FFXIV)

Resolves one of my questions from 1.0!

Besides the main story questline, there are also a few highlights, including what appears to be a very funny sidequest involving a silly detective called Hildibrand and his sidekick Miqo'te and a silly looking "aesthetician". I haven't done the Hildibrand quest series yet, but Teven seemed to enjoy it!

I'm not sure that outfit is for detectives, but... okay :o

Snip snip!

His customers seem to look... dazed... high?

O.O

Ya, I just had to use the haircut option! I'm wondering if this might be a little too cute... I had originally wanted to just get the short hair version of my original haircut, but it looks like that's a Hyur only option.

What do you think?

More good: Actual content!

We got quite a few new things to do. A few new dungeons, new "extreme mode primals", Good King Moogle Mog and a new Ultima fight... I do like the story behind the Ultima fight which amusingly manages to rehash a fight but is not as flimsy as a "oh, primals are acting up again" excuse that was used for the primal hard modes.

You look familiar! Have I killed you before?

Lots of crystals on the roof in the new dungeon... wait... is this place structurally sound?!

Hey Zu, we're going to have to kill you now. No offense!

Lots of crystals here... including around the bosses

BOOBS! I mean... hi Siren

Pharos Sirius was the only one of the three new dungeons that I had time to try so far. It's supposedly the hardest 4-man content, and it is a decent challenge. Well... it's fun to learn the mechanics and figure it out, but it'll basically be on farm mode in no time. 

The main rewards for this dungeon are the AK ilevel 60 accessories, and some other ilevel 60 gear with different models from AK. The good news is that this has multiple chests with accessories, making it easier to get those accessories compared to the silly one chest in AK. The bad news is that there's really no point in doing this dungeon more than once. The reward of 50 mythology is higher compared to the 30 from WP/AK, but it also takes about twice as long as a WP run. The ilevel 60 accessories are basically useless since you can just use the free flowing philo tomes to buy ilevel 70 darklight. This basically becomes a "I'm bored of doing WP, let's do PS something for a change" farming dungeon.

But I guess it has boobs!

The new Ultima fight is a lot of fun! It will definitely be a challenge to figure the mechanics out and how to execute the fight properly. Throw in a bit of practice and I expect this to basically be as farmable as Titan. Still, it's nice to have some new fun challenging content!

Good King Moogle Mog on the other hand, is not only fun, but also funny!

Why are these moogles carrying weapons... and... they look a LOT bigger than me!

OMG CUTE! If SE releases these in plushie form I'll go broke! (I already have the FFXIV moogle plushie!)

I like the dance they do to summon the big guy...

And there he is!

SE said that this fight would be around the level of Garuda's difficulty, and I think they are spot on. The main thing is just learning the mechanics again... it's nowhere near as difficult as Titan. We won it on a whimsical Duty Finder attempt (and I got the moogle axe! ilevel 75, which matches the Garuda weapons post-patch) 

Oh, for those wondering, this primal fight is unlocked as part of the main scenario!

The Bad

There are a few things which I would say are... bad, or perhaps, barely acceptable.

Beast Tribe Quests

Dailies... the ultimate in "we want you to continue paying us a subscription fee, but not feel like you're being cheated" MMO content. The concept behind this is that you can do quests for two of the beastmen tribes to gain "reputation". You can only do 3 quests a day, each quest taking between 3 minutes for a simple one, to over an hour if you get one that requires participating in a FATE. You have to do the quests every day to keep up with gaining your alloted amount of reputation. Reputation unlocks the ability buy higher tier items, including two new mounts.

Plain and simple, it's a grind to keep you subscribed for the time it takes to cap your reputation. There's a flimsy storyline attached to each of the tribes, so I guess it's similar to the Grand Company promotions, except intentionally retarded so that your progress is held back.

Yes, riding fire breathing drakes in a metal bikini makes perfect sense! Oh, the mask is for protection!

May as well set these two outposts as favorites... You'll be teleporting here daily!

Treasure Hunts

This seems... like another silly random grind for people. From my understanding, only gatherers above level 40 can find treasure maps. You can only hold one map, and you can only get one map every 18 hours or so? And the rewards were... basically pretty crappy.

Pop treasure chest, fight a few easy mobs, get crap. Oh, and funny treasure chest icon

I think this treasure map had suggested a party of 8, but it was so easy I think a party of 3 could have probably done it. You get some gil, some crafting items and consumables which is spread out randomly among the party members who helped.

From what I read, it also seems like some rare minions can be found in the treasure hunt... Given that I have no gatherer classes at all at this time, it looks like this is content that I won't be able to experience very often.

PvP

SE was never good at PvP. Does anyone know ANYONE who enjoyed PvP in FFXI? For that matter... people DO know that PvP exists in FFXI, right? xD

So far, my experience in PvP in FFXIV has been:

1. Queue up duty finder, wait ~5 minutes for the queue to pop
2. Zone into the Wolve's Den, healer buffs people, wait another 2 minutes for the timer to pop (why is this a 2 minute timer?! It doesn't take THAT long to cast Protect and Stoneskin!)
3. Chaaaaarge... then SLEEP OR BE SLEPT!
4. Either way, fight is over in about a minute. Pre-made teams have a distinct advantage here since they can easily coordinate who to gang up on and take out fast
5. Game over... results, get kicked out

That's it... just head to head, no respawns, no additional objectives... erm... I think the FFXI's Ballista or Brenner at least had some objectives? SWTOR had many different PvP games which were a lot of fun and was quite well balanced. This seems to be oriented towards melee DPS running circles around people, and sleepers!

Oh, and there's PvP gear for you to grind away to buy... this does not look interesting at all. I'm fully expecting this to become a very niche bit of content as the hardcore PvP people quickly gear up, and then proceed to steamroll anyone new who tries to play.

At least there's a pretty new zone?

Zenification of content

Anyone remember how much they enjoyed Pankration in FFXI? Me neither... but did everyone remember being forced to play pankration to farm zeni in order to do the ZNMs? 

Well, they've zenified guildhests!

As part of the main scenario quest, you'll be forced to do a number of guildhests... remember those? They are the tutorial instances which you do once, then never do again. In fact, SE even encourages this since you get a bonus for doing it the first time, but minimal rewards if you repeat it.

So... here you are, having saved the world, in your full mythology gear, and going back to level 15 to learn how to tank. ~.~ Seriously?

And yes, I'm now declaring zenified as a new word! Meaning forcing old and unused content on people.

Participating in zenified content in event gear is probably appropriate

The Ugly

Another thing that has been zenified is the Full Active Time Event or FATE system that is built into FFXIV. As you know, FATEs are dynamic events that occur at random in the game. Since the "Lightning Strikes" event ended, it's clear that FATEs are underused. Hence, SE has decided to make it a requirement for you to do FATEs in order to unlock the Crystal Tower and the Hildibrand Returns questlines to bring back this bit of content.

What... people actually do FATEs? What do you mean this is the main thing people have been doing to level up?

So, I haven't actually tried to do any of these FATE quests. SE released an announcement saying that there is a "known issue" about these FATEs taking a long time to spawn and that a fix will be coming tomorrow. This leads to many people doing this:

SE managed to bring NM camping back to XIV!

I've run past quite a few areas where people are literally standing around in giant groups where these FATEs pop... standing around, waiting... waiting... waiting... and if you've ever done a FATE, you know that with that many people you have maybe 15-20 seconds to get full credit for the FATE. This essentially requires you to be at your computer, sitting right where the FATE starts to have a chance of getting credit and progressing along the quest line. What can make things worse is that in some FATEs, you may not be able to see the boss mob (like in Odin or Behemoth), making it difficult to get credit.

SE already says that this is a "known issue" and that they will be fixing it tomorrow. I'm actually a little suspicious about this issue and think that this "bug" is actually intentional for a few reasons:

1. The announcement that this is a known issue came up surprisingly fast, barely hours after the patch went live
2. The announcement of a timeframe for the fix was also fast, but surprisingly, was not in a "will be done ASAP" or "will be announced soon" manner. Rather, it was for two days in the future
3. The frequency of the required FATEs essentially bottlenecks players from entering the Crystal Tower. People can't enter it until they finish the questline, and doing so requires the FATE to be done. They know that every time a group of FATEs is cycled through the servers, a bunch more players will be able to queue up for CT.

I think that SE is being smart here and intentionally slowing down the FATE frequency so that they can keep an eye on the CT instance servers and monitor the load. Everyone remembers early on in 2.0 when we had multi-hour waits to get into AK, or worse, having the instance servers crash. By blaming this "bug", they can prevent the influx of players from crashing brand new content, and yet keep people from complaining too much as they have already announced a "fix" that is coming.

Duty Roulette

On paper, this looks like a good idea... in fact, this is probably a godsend for people who are completely solo players who came to this game alone without help, and have yet to make friends as it increases the number of people who do the low level dungeons.

In practice... well, I think roulette is a good description. I don't gamble, but from my understanding about roulette, you lose almost all of the time. Basically, expect to lose in duty roulette!

The low level dungeons are probably fine up until Brayflox. After that, think about the first times you've done Sunken Temple, Cutter's Cry or Stone Vigil. Now consider that most of the people queuing for these dungeons that require people from duty roulette to help have probably never done these dungeons before. Now add in the fact that these same people have most likely used FATE grinding to get up to their levels and have no clue how to play their jobs, or have any level appropriate gear. That's what the "low level" dungeon roulette will bring.

The "high level" roulette consists of all level 50 dungeons. This includes Pharos Sirius, the hardest 4-man dungeon as described by Yoshi-P himself. Now think about how early duty finder groups have trouble clearing the demon wall in AK. Would you waste your time on this, or simply get 3 other friends and go farm mythology the old fashioned way?

I've already wasted my time in duty finder roulette, meeting players who don't even know what spells they can cast, or abilities they have, or even the fact that they have job quests which unlock new abilities. Having to remind a Scholar constantly to summon their fairy is a sure sign that that I should have dropped the party. The "bonus" for joining does not matter if the group cannot complete the content! 

I'm not interested in gambling more with my limited playtime.

Crystal Tower

The first 24-man content... and... it requires grouping up with at least 16 other completely random people. So... they've taken herding cats and turned it into herding wild cats! Getting 18 people you know moving in the same direction in FFXI was hard enough, now we have to do it with 24 strangers? I wonder who thought this was a good idea.

Throw in the high possibility of getting under-geared, FATE leveled, or simply put "special" players and you have a situation best described as four monkeys fucking a football (Copyright Rooks, 2013).

The loot lockout is the icing on the cake! Guess what... people not only have no reason to do CT again after they get whatever item they get for that week, but a good bulk of the CT loot will be thrown away! CT has been out for less than 24 hours and people are all passing on the gear that drops, letting it hit the floor instead of having it go to use.

At least you get... somewhat cool cutscenes? 

The silly tower... made of crystal

Wait, CID wants us to go into this cluster? Maybe he IS being mind controlled by the Ascians!

Housing

There were two major highlights in the 2.1 patch. The Crystal Tower was one, and the other was housing. A big deal was made about housing, and previews were out there since before 2.0 was even released! All the pretty zones, all the nice furniture...

... and... look at the nice pricing! 20M for a plot of land that is about twice the size of an inn room, and 325M for the largest. A medium plot runs 75-93M, which is probably what would be suitable for CTR. 

right... I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm barely hanging on to my gil here. I had under 300k from going from level 1-50 through quests, and then I had a brief period where I was able to sell some philo items before that market completely crashed. Between the maybe... 30ish people in CTR, I doubt we can get everyone to pony up 1-3M gil for a plot of land.

Oh, but don't worry. Yoshi-P says that the land price will go down constantly until it's half price in about 3 months. And no, that's not a blatant attempt to keep you subbed... or is it?

At least it's pretty... and you won't have noisy neighbors since you won't have ANY neighbors for a long time!

With beaches and as Zu would say... SQUAWK!

Ul'dah feels like being in the middle of a canyon... with waterfalls, lakes...

Not pictured: Miqo'te dancers!

I think the further slap to the face is how there are all these new furniture items that can be bought by grand company seals, but nobody will be able to use them since nobody will have a house to put them in! Last I checked, not a single plot of land was sold on Hyperion. Perhaps RMT should change their strategies and simply "sell" a house by joining a FC and making the purchase. 

Oh, and since I had no real use for seals at this time, I went ahead and switched GCs to the Immortal Flames. This is my 3rd and final GC change!

Bye bye 50k gil!

In conclusion...

So, is 2.1 enough to hold your interest? They've added some obvious daily grinds, and put in some content that is not only out of nearly everyone's reach to experience, but that Yoshi-P himself expects everyone to be grinding away, working at the game to afford. Perhaps they can add in some mortgage companies... 3.5% 5/1 ARMs, 20% deposit?

What do you think? Comments below!

Oh, in other news... I'm debating how much longer I want to look at people from this perspective:

When are they going to sell fantasia potions in the Mog Station?! Or should I just change back to Hyur now?