As Investors Worry About Square Enix, Final Fantasy XIV Devs Plan To Keep On Making Variant And Criterion Dungeons

When Square Enix announced Variant and Criterion dungeons as a new type of high-end content for smaller groups, a lot of Final Fantasy XIV players were pretty excited. It seems like the content has been relatively popular, with players working hard to get the variant mounts. According to an interview with Battle Content Designer Masatoshi Ishikawa on Inverse, player feedback on the content has been positive, so players can expect more of them in the future.

Included in the feedback that may result in some changes are comments from the players that the current rewards for the Criterion dungeons aren’t enough to make players bother with the MMORPG's content. This makes sense as players are required to complete the Criterion multiple times in order to accumulate enough currency to buy the rewards and, with the exception of the mount, the rewards are pretty general things like materia. At the same time, Criterions are comparable to Savage raid content, even requiring players to have a fairly high iLvL in order to attempt them.

It’s a pretty fair bet, however, that a good portion of the population completes the easier Variants and obtains their mounts.

What changes we might see around rewards remains to be seen. It doesn’t seem, however, that it will be anything big, as Ishikawa noted that they need to be careful about how the rewards relate to the content.

In additional (not-FFXIV specific) Final Fantasy news, Square Enix’s stock isn’t doing so well following the launch of Final Fantasy XVI. Reportedly, the game didn’t meet the company’s high end expectations. However, it wasn’t the only game that caused the company problems and contributed to a 30% stock drop resulting in a loss of almost $2 billion in market value. Other games that caused issues include Marvel’s Avengers (closing this month) and Forspoken.