Yoshi-P Interview Reiterates How Big The Next Final Fantasy XIV Patch Is

Tomorrow, Friday, March 14, Yoshi-P will be hosting the second half of the patch 7.2 Live Letter providing us with the rest of the details about Seekers of Eternity – without spoiling the story, of course. That said, if you’d like some of those details now, and can translate Japanese or are willing to put up with questionable AI translations, you might want to check out the Final Fantasy XIV director’s interview with Famitsu.

The interview discusses a lot of the MMORPG's upcoming content. However, knowing that we’ll be seeing everything in the Live Letter tomorrow, we’ve decided to share some of the other highlights instead. We already know that this upcoming patch is intended to be a pretty sizeable patch and that it will offer a lot for players to do. After all, this is the patch that introduces the new operation, The Occult Crescent, as well Cosmic Exploration for crafters and gatherers. Both will introduce new relic items for players to work on. That’s all before the new MSQ, Manderville story, and the next batch of raids. Oh yeah, and the return of the Cornservant… because. Gotta love a guy who just wants to feed everyone. He offers more details on some of this content in the interview.

While we expect Yoshi-P to expand on this tomorrow, there were some interesting points in the interview about one batch of content we don’t expect to be covered in the Live Letter. As we won’t be getting the next Alliance Raid content in 7.2, it’s less likely that he’ll worry about spending stream time on it. But that’s not to say he’s not happy to talk about it.

In the Famitsu interview he discusses player reaction to the Echoes of Vana'diel Alliance Raids, which bring the world of Final Fantasy XI to XIV. As you might expect with any IP that has a dedicated fanbase, there was some worry about how the content might be received. When it comes to something like this, you want to make it fun for everyone involved while paying due respect to the thing that so many people love. Based on player response, it seems the team have managed to do just that, so far. For one thing, it drew the attention of XIV players who haven’t tried XI to the older game. It also seemed to please XI fans. The dev team “received a very positive response from players”, something that Yoshi-P admits he’s relieved about. Here’s hoping they love what’s to come just as much.

Finally, there’s something smaller that will interest most players. Sometimes, when you’re running around in one of the cities, you really want to get across town quickly. Yes, we do have crystals scattered about town to help us out, but sometimes it just makes more sense to run. The problem comes in when your sprint runs out.

Apparently the team has been working on a bit of a fix for this. No, we won’t have perma-sprint, as the rest of the game content has to be taken into account. The devs have come up with a new “jog” status. Effectively, when sprint expires in a safe area, players will automatically gain a “jog” status. It won’t let them go quite as fast as sprinting, but it will be faster than normal movement. I’m not even sure what to call that since it’s always looked like a jog to me. Either way, you’ll still be going faster than you normally do and once the sprint is back up you can turn it back on and the cycle continues.