The Mog Log: Nothing changes when you leve

Apparently, my not-really strategy of promising a column on a given topic in the following week has ensured that we're kept in a steady stream of interesting Final Fantasy XIV and Final Fantasy XI news, just enough that my plans for the following week are derailed. It does make the "next week" sentence a bit useless, but I'm not really complaining. So while I was going to talk about timing, this week we're talking about guildleves instead because Naoki Yoshida certainly wants to talk about the changes being made to guildleves.

I talked a while back about the place that guildleves have in the game's overall scheme of content -- namely, that they serve the role of effective repeatable content that fills in the gaps between memorable content. The funny thing is, for all the talk in both the producer's letter and the subsequent outline of changes about what will be altered, I don't think the real change is coming down on our end. I think it's just a change in production values.

Let's start with the obvious. The change to gains in guildleves should result in a net benefit or a net equivalence -- you're not getting bonus points from kills, but you are getting a chunk of points at the end. This means that on leves with reveals or on one of the various Necrologos hunts, you won't be functionally penalized for clearing things out quickly. (Actually, considering the hint of better rewards if you clear leves out quickly, you'll find that the rare-but-possible event of getting all your needed pages without a single "a monster appears" prompt feels like a bonus.) But aside from making quick work feel like something worthy of accolades, there isn't going to be a huge change in functionality.

Evening out the monsters you have to fight and altering the routes to follow are both nice, but these are also the sort of things that should be taking place to some extent anyhow. There's a certain marked disconnect in the fact that currently, some leves are worth doing and others just aren't. Frankly, I find the enviornmental monsters to be the problem as often as the leve targets, but that's a discussion for another time. Similarly, tying the rewards and guild makers to the appropriate city just gives players more incentive to travel and see the world, something I'm all in favor of.

If anything, the real change that's missing here is shortening that reset timer. If you're going to call this quick solo content, we need to have some means to quickly solo it. Perhaps in a future patch.

But here's the thing -- all of these changes, functionally, are refinements of what guildleves already are. If you've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for a while, you already have a pretty clear picture of how to get the most out of any given leve, how to tell whether it's worth doing the whole darn thing, etc. This is already the purpose that this content serves. The only difference is that now the designers are acknowledging the need for this disposable content to be supplemented by some more group experiences and more diverse solo experiences in order to spread out those memorable bursts of content.

There's nothing wrong with leves as a leveling option, but there is a problem with leves being the only functional option. It makes you feel like you're leveling so that you can unlock the next tier of content, and it's telling that Yoshida has identified this problem and is taking steps to correct it. The idea of leves -- that they would scale around to different group sizes via use of the difficulty slider -- never really panned out beyond the wilds of Theoryland, so dropping that whole aspect and just going with a straight scale for lone wolves is the better option.

That having been said... outside of promising to add more quests, Yoshida hasn't really talked about what sort of other content we can expect. Grand Companies are going to result in many twitchy eyes if they're mandatory group content, and that's the biggest feature that's been crowed about in update previews. Instanced dungeons are also nice, but again, players are going to get bored if all the leveling content is soloing guildleves, just like they'll get bored if the only things that aren't guildleves require full parties.

Just to head off an obvious question/complaint: I'm not saying that full party content is a bad thing. I'm saying it's a bad thing when your only alternative is meant to fill in the blank spaces of content. Then again, I'm fretting here about something that by all accounts Yoshi-P seems to understand, so I'll just leave it there.

So what does this mean for the design process? Well, for starters, I think we can expect most patches to add new things other than guildleves to help bolster the game's content. (I'm hoping we do see some more leves, especially now that it's not going to be quite as easy to leapfrog past lower level bands, but that's a smaller issue.) And that's really where we've already seen development effort focused. There's been a lot of talk of adding new quests and new systems but very little about actually expanding the leve roster. As Yoshida himself has said in various postings, right now, one of the big goals is to make sure that there's an end goal to leveling that people find appealing.

Guildleves are a good tool for providing the leveling path, but they're not a great reason to level alone. And I'm glad to see that our producer gets that.

As always, comments are welcome in the field below or via mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week, we're either going to take a look at the timing issues I had meant to address this week or the results of the most recent Vana'diel census. (Or we're going to have another infobomb dropped on us. Let's go for the gusto.)

From Eorzea to Vana'diel, there is a constant: the moogles. And for analysis and opinions about the online portions of the Final Fantasy series, there is also a constant: The Mog Log. Longtime series fan Eliot Lefebvre serves up a new installment of the log every Saturday, covering almost anything related to Square-Enix's vibrant online worlds.