Random Roar: Pour One Out for the Steps of Faith

 

During the July 1st Live Letter for Final Fantasy XIV, it was announced that the 8-man trial known as the Steps of Faith would no longer be available as an 8-man trial and will instead be a solo instance.  This isn’t the first time that instanced content has been changed so drastically, but it caught my eye due to how much I enjoy the fight.

It’s yet another change to content from the first few years of the game that the developers have made recently.  Anyone joining the game now are going to get a different experience than those who played the game when it came out.  Admittedly, most of these changes have been for the better, but this change in particular feels like it hits a little closer to home for me.

I’ve always liked Steps of Faith, even through the nerfs it’s suffered over the years.  There’s just something awesome about a dragon slowly marching across a bridge, not caring one whit about the adventurers that are trying to kill it, only thinking of its prey at the other end of the bridge: the city state of Ishgard.  At one time, you had to worry about mechanics, but now you just run along the bridge, attacking the dragon while pretending it’s a desperate struggle.  The dragon dies about halfway across now, and you have to be a special level of bad to lose.

Changing the Steps of Faith is the latest way in which the developers of the game are bringing it more in line with the kind of game they’re making now, as opposed to the kind of game they had originally made.  It all began when they started looking into what they would need to do in order to listen to player feedback about the quest structure of patches 2.1 through 2.55.  At the time the patches were released, no one really batted an eye.  Each patch was a respectable length and gave players plenty to do.

But then players began to look at the patches as a whole and they started to see the problems.  There were simply too many quests standing between them and Heavensward as soon as they finished A Realm Reborn, and many of them were filler quests.  There was political intrigue in Ul’dah, sure, and Minfilia mentioned Krile for the first time, and Ishgard started to talk to the other city states again, and a method for killing the unkillable Ascians was discovered, but for the most part, the patches didn’t do a lot to really set things up until Patch 2.4, when Shiva was introduced.  This not only set the stage for the beginning of Heavensward, it also introduced one of the key characters of the expansion.

The developers learned as they went.  Patches 3.1 through 3.55 were far more streamlined, and the post game patch cycle has felt comfortable ever since.  The Heavensward patch cycle even set up the story for Shadowbringers, that’s how far ahead everyone was working.

Several years after they were incorporated into the game, patches 2.1 through 2.55 got significantly reworked to bring them more in line with later patch cycles, and this isn’t the only way in which the developers decided to check their work and make changes.

The dungeons of A Realm Reborn have always had an interesting novelty to them.  It felt like they were designed for a game that may have intended to iterate on the ideas presented, but then they chose to streamline the experience instead, making dungeons the same linear path from beginning to end, sometimes with room transitions and sometimes without.

Boss design was also rather interesting.  One boss in Copperbell Mines was actually mainly an add rush with a weak boss at the end, another was a slime you had to split apart with explosives, and the last boss let more of his kind out of imprisonment, with the intent to overwhelm the party through sheer numbers.

Of course, the problem with these dungeons was that they weren’t designed to be farmed.  You did them in the main story and you possibly did them to level other classes or help out a friend, and then you never ran them again.

So naturally, to make sure dungeons stayed relevant, the ongoing relic weapon quest required the repeated running of the game’s dungeons.  But this exposed their fatal flaw: several of the dungeon and boss mechanics couldn’t be sped up by wearing stronger gear.  You still had to explode the slime, every time.

Dungeons in A Realm Reborn were given a huge overhaul in patch 6.1 – mainly to change a lot of the boss fights from enemies with gimmicks to enemies that actually use mechanics that show up later in the game – with the biggest change being made to the final two dungeons of the base game.

Over the years, Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium were notorious as dungeons that no one wanted to properly run, but they were the only entries in a special daily roulette you could choose to do for a massive boost to your character’s experience points, and a large amount of currency.  Since veteran players were pressuring new players into either skipping cutscenes or skipping battles, the developers made the cutscenes unskippable, but then the problem was that the battles themselves stopped being threatening.  These dungeons were cinematic experiences that were supposed to feel epic during your first time through, and I imagine they weren’t meant to be run repeatedly day after day, with equipment about twice as powerful as when the dungeons were new.  But new players were having trouble finding a group, thus the roulette system was utilized to help these new players.

Repeating these dungeons day after day meant that veteran players were getting tired of them and so they would skip the videos and just run ahead of new players trying to experience things properly, leading to new players being stuck at the start and watching cutscene after cutscene play, losing the experience of the rest of the dungeon.  They were originally meant for eight players and designed like they were the absolute final dungeons in the game, but then the game was successful and so more dungeons were added for players to experience after, and the expansions added even more dungeons, but none of them required eight players.

In patch 6.1, these dungeons were retooled to only require four players like everything else, and The Praetorium was shortened by three fights.  The first two of these fights were turned into a third, much shorter four player instance that was added to the same roulette and the last fight became another solo fight.  The mechanics were also changed so that normal enemies weren’t skippable anymore and bosses weren’t just HP punching bags.

Patch 6.1 also took away an eight player battle called Cape Westwind and replaced it with a solo instance.  Honestly, that one stopped being relevant once we had strong enough gear that its mechanics didn’t matter, so seeing it become a solo battle didn’t surprise me.  I’m sure people didn’t mind running the old version, it was quick and easy, but it felt like swinging a stick at a piñata.

A lot of what was changed about how A Realm Reborn and its patches play have been meant to bring it more in line with the kind of game that Final Fantasy XIV has evolved into, and I do understand that.  I know that changing the Steps of Faith is another way that the game is being improved.  The Steps of Faith stopped being relevant once players managed to convince the developers to make most of the interesting mechanics not matter.  But I will still miss the fight.  I loved running it as a Black Mage because I could use my procs and Swiftcast to keep up with the dragon.  It always felt like I was constantly dealing the most, or close to the most, damage.

The Steps of Faith is a battle that would’ve been fine the way it was if the game hadn’t become as popular as it currently is.  If A Realm Reborn had been all we ever got, it would never have needed changing, but many of the battles that worked as final dungeons and final bosses were no longer final and there was no sense of escalation.  There was a noticeable de-escalation from The Praetorium to the dungeons added in the patches, and then Heavensward didn’t add any more eight player dungeons.  Even Endwalker‘s final dungeon, The Dead Ends, is a four player dungeon.  So Castrum Meridianum and The Praetorium are now four player dungeons, and the Steps of Faith will now be a solo instance that can only be replayed in New Game + mode or by creating a brand new character.

I spent part of today replaying the battle over and over with new players who’d never experienced it before and veterans who got to experience it one last time before the change.  I don’t think I’ll ever be fully ready to let go of it, but hopefully the solo version will restore a lot of what the fight had lost.