While in attendance at the Final Fantasy 14 Shadowbringers preview event in London, I was given an overview of the content coming to the MMO. In addition, Director and Producer Naoki Yoshida gave some detailed information regarding changes coming to the game.
As part of patch 5.0 and Shadowbringers a host of minor changes are being made to Final Fantasy 14. These changes aren’t significant to warrant an entire post of their own, but they are significant enough to be mentioned.
Many of these changes have been made in order to streamline the experience, make it better for players and to remove confusion.
Shadowbringers Changes
One of the smallest but most impactful changes coming to Shadowbringers is the new Light Skin UI. Since Final Fantasy 14 launched, the default Dark Skin has been the only UI options for players.
With Shadowbringers, the Light Skin will be a choice and the Dark Skin will remain the default. Yoshida said that more skins will be added over time but it will be infrequent.
Crossworld Link Shells will be expanded to eight channels instead of being a single channel.
While playing Shadowbringers, Target Information will be updated and will now display a decial % for boss health. This will remove the frustration of seeing a bosses health stay at 1% for a long time and not knowing just how much health is left.
Yoshida joked that players may wipe when the boss is at 0.1% health, but at least they’d know how close they came to finishing.
Players who live for the housing mechanics in Final Fantasy 14 will be pleased to know that in Shadowbringers, they’ll finally be able to preview the placement of their furniture.
What Else, Combat?
The combat system is also being overhauled in Shadowbringers with many changes being implemented. One of these changes is the Charged Action System that allows players to store charges on their Actions for additional uses.
When you use an Action now, you’ll see the cooldown timer and once it’s finished you’ll be able to use the Action again. With the Charged Action System, charges will build until they reach the maximum limit. With charges accrued, players can use an Action multiple times instead of having to wait.
The Casting Interrupt System has been refined and redesigned too. The PvE ‘Silence’ status effect has been added to the new system. In the old system, it was often difficult to tell if Silence would work or not. In Shadowbringers, interruptible actions are more easily discernible.
Additionally, enemy actions are highlighted once interrupted and are visually displayed. Tanks and Ranged DPS will be given interrupt actions as Role Actions and Role Action customisation will be removed.
What this means is that Role Actions will be revised into set actions and new Role Actions will be automatically obtained by level. The number of actions available for each role has also been adjusted;
- Tank – 7 Role Actions
- Healer – 5 Role Actions
- Physical DPS – 6 Role Actions
- Ranged DPS – 5 Role Actions
- Magical DPC – 4 Role Actions
Actions and Combat in Final Fantasy 14 have always been governed by MP and TP and in Shadowbringers, they have been changed. TP will be removed altogether and MP will be capped at 10,000.
The reason for the changes is that different Jobs had a different maximum number of spells able to be cast. The number was based on the percentage of max MP and it was difficult to figure out how many casts you could perform.
Actions affected by the TP removal will be revised and adjusted accordingly.
Pets have also undergone changes and now they won’t be attacked by monsters or lose HP. Additionally, Pet actions have been removed from the Hotbar and are recategorised into Player Actions.
The Actions for Pets that function as Tanks will be revised. With the current Pet Action system, players have to manually select a specific Action. In Shadowbringers, players will perform Actions for multiple pets and the AI will select the appropriate Action based on the situation.
The Battle System calculations in Shadowbringers has been adjusted and changed. For example, chain bonuses for Dungeons have been removed in order to standardise EXP gains.
The Damage Limit has also been increased from 999,999 to 9,999,999. Yoshida advised this increase has been included to account for future damage inflation. However, he added that by expansion six the damage will likely be redenominated and reduced so as to not be so large.
All of these changes have been made to streamline and improve Final Fantasy 14 and to make the game better than ever before. While some of the changes detailed above are more significant than others, each of them adds to the overall quality of Shadowbringers and the new experience Square Enix has designed for this expansion.
Leo Stevenson travelled to London, UK as a guest of Square Enix. Flights, Meals and Accommodation were provided by Square Enix.
