Somehow, the final Endwalker content patch has arrived. All right, maybe you could argue that’s just the tiniest bit premature; technically we’ve still got that crossover event coming, that’s a thing to think about, and we might have a little extra stuff here and there which might require a small patch. But for all intents and purposes, this is the patch that puts the bow on Final Fantasy XIV’s expansion… although it also isn’t because Endwalker really did end with patch 6.0, and I suspect that’s what has had a lot of people rustled about it.
Still, that’s old news, and what I’m interested in is seeing what happens when the patch goes live tomorrow. So let’s walk through what we know is coming, what we can expect, and my thoughts on the like. It’s worth noting that this is being written before the patch notes are live, so there may be a piece of speculation here and there that isn’t accurate; you know how I do, I put all this stuff up-front. On with the show.
The most interesting thing that we know is coming with this patch is Asura. I don’t mean that necessarily as the thing I care about the most; it’s just the fact that we’re getting a new trial separate from any other sort of content structure. And it’s worth noting that Asura is not mentioned as having a Savage version, which in and of itself could mean… a bunch of different things.
Let’s start with the obvious possibility: It could be that Asura is the capstone trial for the Hildibrand quests. This would not be unusual in and of itself; the first and third Hildibrand questlines both ended with a trial. In fact, it’s worth noting that the first trial was against Gilgamesh, a multi-armed warrior, and the second trial was against Yojimbo, a particularly sword-focused character. And here’s Asura, with multiple arms and swords…
The main difference, of course, is that Asura hasn’t been built up in these quests. Yojimbo was established well before we faced off against him, as was Gilgamesh, and both of them are… if not silly characters, at least less serious ones. (Yes, I know, it turned out Yojimbo was Greg. Not the point.) Historically, Asura actually has a fairly strong place in the games where she shows up, and she’s not usually a joke.
On the other hand, it would serve as more of a gate between the final stage of the relic weapon than we’ve had previously. Likely not much of one, but a little bit.
It’s also possible that Asura is simply an additional piece of content, more akin to the Odin trial from the game’s relaunch patches… which would raise the question of what she will actually reward. Here I think there are a couple of possibilities, and the first one is something that’s gone unserved since Heavensward in that she could solve the one gear slot problem non-Savage raiders have dealt with in the form of rings.
Rings are unique until the end of the expansion, and that means that players who don’t run Savage are stuck with one ring that’s going to be not upgraded no matter what. It’s not a major difference, of course – you will have exactly the same edge going into Dawntrail at item level 659 as you will at item level 660. But giving players some incentive to run the trial a few times to get that last ring would certainly motivate people looking for something to do.
The other possibility are, of course, cosmetic bits of armor and weapons. I say “cosmetic” because we’ve historically had weapons locked behind the Savage raids until it’s possible to upgrade; when the patch arrives, we’ll be topping out with 660, or 665 if you did your Relic/upgraded your final weapon tier. It seems unlikely Asura will really deviate from that.
That’s a whole lot of words about just one trial, isn’t it? But I think that’s also understandable because beyond Asura, most of what we’re looking at for this patch is going to be largely one-and-done content. I don’t imagine that the relic weapon process is going to be significantly changed from what it has been up until now because… why would it be? The course is fixed. Part of me kind of hopes Asura isn’t the capstone for the quests just because having some actual rewards will make her more interesting to run, even with just weekly drops.
The new story quests are interesting insofar as they will definitely show off more than we perhaps expected, with Krile getting her job upgrade and Wuk Lamat strutting her stuff, but it’s still not going to take anyone six months to get through them barring deliberate delay tactics. At most we might get a nice cosmetic reward from the story, but I’m not really betting on it.
I am very curious about what we’re going to get from cosmetic rewards once we wrap up the tribal quest conclusion and the Tataru series. The former took an unexpected break during Shadowbringers, and I’m honestly kind of still sad that we don’t have some kind of wrapup for those quests, but they usually are all about one last nice cosmetic reward. The latter, though, has been… interesting, albeit not primarily interesting in terms of narrative so much as meta-narrative.
One of the things that I noted about the role quests in Endwalker was that they served in no small part to wrap up the stories that otherwise didn’t get touched upon. They were final farewells to several characters and plots that we’d grown accustomed to. Tataru’s quests have generally done the same thing, giving a final wrap-up to characters we have endings for but might want a final sense of what’s happening. So which storylines are left that even need that sort of conclusion – or even can receive it?
More importantly, what has this been building toward? Yes, it’s cool that we got some new portraits for housing and a cosmetic set – that’s all neat – but these don’t feel quite like justified rewards for doing all of it just yet. I might just be cynical because these aren’t rewards that I feel the need to grab, but I am very curious to see what the wrap-up looks like here.
So it’s not quite as engaging as I would have liked for this patch to be after what seems like a lengthy delay, but… yeah, there are some question marks and some parts that I’m interested in. I’ll be there on Tuesday going ham just as always, so I suppose it works just fine.
And if the developers wanted to do something really funny, they could give everyone the Viper outfit as a free set of cosmetics from the end of the MSQ instead of making it be artifact armor. I know, it’d be kind of trolling and it’s extremely unlikely, but you have to admit it would be really funny, too.
Feedback, as always, is welcome in the comments down below or via mail to eliot@massivelyop.com. Next week, it should be pretty obvious what I’m doing. I’ll be talking about the patch in terms of experience, not in terms of theory.
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.
