FFXIV: A Look Back...at Patch 2.1 (ARR 10 Year Anniversary)

foreign Mr Happy here this year I am celebrating 10 years of service for Final Fantasy 14 A Realm Reborn by looking back on everything that's happened since the game came back from the grave that was 1.0 I already have my retrospective job series ongoing where I'm looking at the jobs and how they've evolved over the years the Summoner one was wild but there's something else that I want to look back on and Tackle an important question within the community I want to look back on the old patches for Final Fantasy 14. see the volume of content what kind of content was introduced and how that content was received at the time and compare that patch by patch by patch all the way back to patch 2.0 and 2.1 to our current day yes even the stuff that's only happened about a year ago because well it feels like 10 years in that one year alone I think a lot of us can agree with that so welcome to part one of my patch retrospective Series where we'll be doing exactly as I described looking back on Old patches to see what was introduced what's still relevant what's been made irrelevant etc etc so with that let's get started now one patch I think we can kind of skim over is actually A Realm Reborn itself yes it is the master class story of Reviving an MMO that brought a company to its knees and was considered a stain upon the Final Fantasy franchise and in less than three years was brought into the life that it has today and has continued to flourish for the last 10 years but that being said a realm reborn's initial launch was kind of the I'll call it the bare minimum for an MMO launch by modern day standards it wasn't very impressive the most impressive thing being that it was made in the first place in patch 2.0 we had of course the level 1 to 50 msq ending with the praetor thorium now while I enjoyed the aroma-born story even to this day having replayed it several times it's one of those things that was really hit or miss with a lot of people very classic Final Fantasy story and definitely wasn't everyone's cup of tea it also had eight classes and nine jobs with Arcanist branching into Summoner or scholar and that being a new introduction for A Realm Reborn itself now of course we had crafting jobs Gathering jobs and along with the msq you needed a variety of quests to tackle so while there were tons of side quests out in the world things like guildhests leave quests that were also just straight up Dungeons and in total there were 16 dungeons from level 15 all the way up to level 50 including the three dungeons you would get after completing the main scenario now that three dungeon number is definitely going to be one that we hold on to when talking about all of our future patches in this particular case it was am Deport keep one wonders Palace and actually it was only two dungeons here it's gonna be three Dungeons and all the rest of the patches yes because we have praetorium Castro and Deport and Wanderers keep you see still even I'm trying to remember some of these things now we also had three normal mode trials those were part of the main scenario and after you hit max level and finish the final dungeon you could unlock three hard mode trials against efreet Garuda and Titan and Titan in particular was uh quite the Endeavor especially with the built-in 300 Ms latency we had back in patch 2.0 now we also had two super Fates which were Odin and Behemoth these were World bosses that barely worked if I'm gonna be honest they you couldn't really apply debuffs of them most of the time they constantly phased out of existence because too many people were showing up to do them and uh kind of a mess but a fun nostalgic mess I suppose you know anyone who's been around for some of the older MMOs that have had someone our issues looking at you uh looking at you besieged in Final Fantasy 11. sometimes it just kind of works out in your head we also had the Relic Quest now this was a carryover from 1.0 and it was a quest where you go around and do a bunch of you know kill this enemy with this weapon equipped and do this and do that and it actually had some additional trials that were not in the msq we had the Chimera arm so yes we had the Chimera and the Hydra trials as part of this exclusive to that quest line and on top of that you needed the hard mode trials in order to finish it as well and of course the Crown Jewel the first Coil of Bahamut which if you've watched my history of raiding in Final Fantasy 14 video you know was an absolute disaster being taken entirely offline for weeks at a time to attempt to fix the final boss and not having a generally well received rest of the fight or at least not received after the first couple of weeks maybe we were just tired of tintany and it leaked into everything else but if you weren't doing hardcore end game content patch 2.0 is really just about the story and then leveling classes and jobs sound familiar to some of our other expansion releases well not a one-to-one as we'll get to throughout this series but it was just the miracle that it was even done in the first place that made it so incredibly impressive no game had really rebuilt their entire image their entire game like this prior to that and it became an inspiration for other people to give games that maybe started off slow a bit of a chance to actually redeem themselves and catch up and we've seen great success stories like that in the years that followed games such as no man's Sky which definitely didn't release favorably but has done so much to improve its image over time now we've also seen other games go ahead and Destroy themselves over time but that's a topic for a different time but that's patch 2.0 we don't need to get too much into the Nitty Gritty because there's actually an impressive number of things that happen from this point on as now that the base of the MMO was built we can now look at what was put on top of it to give us some features we'll still recognize to this day so with that we move on to the primary topic of this first video patch 2.1 and I gotta say looking back at patch 2.1 it is crazy to see how much different our patch trailers even looked like back then going all the way back into heavensward most of our trailers were just showcases we'd get like the background music to something we'd get a Showcase of new recipes we would get a Showcase of the new Dungeons and it was just hey here's a highlight of some of the more major things and less of a cinematic trailer experience like we've come to know nowadays now of course it had new main scenario quests and they were okay uh the 2.1 through 2.5 it's hard for me to speak too positively of the msq even though now that we have knowledge of current events some of it has aged better and it has of course been adjusted to be more tolerable I suppose even for the new coming players that being said of course if people would throw pitchforks at me if I said oh it was a great addition to the main scenario no it was okay slow paced fillery but you know it's just indicative of the content now Labyrinth of the Ancients was our first 24-man raid the first entry of the Crystal Tower and I'm sure many of you are still very familiar with it thanks to the duty roulette Alliance feature please just give me something that's not Crystal Tower for once either way Labyrinth of the Ancients was originally planned to be part of patch 2.0 and was meant to be a high difficulty 24-man content however when they were developing patch 2.0 it was basically saying that hey there was no way it was going to be done in time and B that they really had a hard focus on difficult content and didn't have something more readily approachable for the average player as such it was reworked into the current 24-man type raid that we have today where it's meant to be done with completely random players you might have a wipe or two you might see some people fall over to a random mechanic but all in all you shouldn't struggle to actually defeat it before the instance timer is up you shouldn't doesn't mean you don't always as we've learned over the years as well that was our entry into the 24-man raid series we also got free company housing yeah our first three housing areas and that of what are they called The Goblet the lavender beds and what's the Lindsay Loom been someone called that's the one I should know best I think that's where my FC's house was it's it's slipping my mind that the whole point is we got our first three housing areas but only free companies could buy houses in that patch and so we wouldn't see personal housing until I believe one major patch later in patch 2.2 but I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself on that front being able to of course purchase the land customize the inside customize the outside all the stuff that you come and know today that was in patch 2.1 it was also way more expensive back then I remember they were trying to get rid of excess skill on the market Legacy players like myself were able to bring over a tenth of our Guild from 1.0 and many of us had hundreds of millions of kills we only said tens of millions of Bill going into patch 2.0 then we have the msq having a trial and that of thorn March now Thorn March hard mode is kind of a joke nowadays now I'm not referring to the reworked version that we got in the recent patches but pretty much within a patch or two it was a non threat in the msq in fact they even actively nerfed it before patch 2.2 because it was causing people to kind of wall up inside of the Duty Finder itself but now you know Thorn March hard mode it was a feature you know we'll we'll throw it in there it was in the trailers and speaking of mughals we also had our first ever Beast tribes now referred to as tribal quests this was the emalgia and the Silph and while the quest lines were and I will argue still are cool the quests were not liked so much long timers on Fates and very tedious objectives that people were actively hoping they wouldn't get well you win some you lose some on certain days but either way that was the start of our Beast tribe Journey we also got a feature that is still beloved and was even just updated again in patch 6.3 in that of treasure maps now in this particular patch when it was introduced there was a range of them a level 30 35 40 45 and of course a couple of level 50 Maps a solo one and a group one there were no dungeon portals like we have nowadays but it was the start of something that would be such a long-term investment for them content-wise and one that I still actively participate in to this day so it's crazy to see that 10 years down the line they managed to create a feature that has survived the test of time in an MMO something that doesn't always happen a big one that's definitely survived the test of time is the esthetician yeah that wasn't introduced until 2.1 and I think most of you would argue that you like being able to change your hairstyle in game well some races maybe don't like that nearly as much but there's Fantasia's always I suppose at least nowadays there wasn't back then good thing you didn't have those classes you know let's move on from talking about vieren rothgar how about that we of course have the return of Hildebrand who was present in one point x and this was the continuation of his story and while we did take a break in shadowbringers another quest line that has survived the era now there were three dungeons I misspoke when talking about patch 2.0 but there were three dungeons added in patch 2.1 there was and I'm gonna try to do this from memory Pharaoh serious which we'll talk about in a little in a little bit there was Copper Bell mines hard mode and there was Hawk Manor hard mode now all of these dungeons were really really liked upon their release and were actually quite difficult Pharaoh Sirius was a hard wall for quite a few people trying to get all the dungeons done for the first time the first boss was chaotic with aoes and and boss attacks coming from every direction and add stacking up this debuff onto the players before they could react and then exploding and the damage was really high not to mention the effects that you were as you were running through you would drop and there'd be explosions and people would get kind of flustered it was a journey for a lot of people back then and honestly sometimes can still be now if you get a full Sprout group hogmanner had some of the same especially with the last boss who to this day people still over DPS and accidentally wiped to crazy how that ended up happening I feel like they changed that but I'd also feel like I'm wrong and then of course we had Copper Bell which was a bit finicky much like its original version but was still relatively well liked but what's the point of all these dungeons if you don't have a duty roulette yeah Duty roulettes weren't until that's 2.1 either so for the first five months we didn't have a leveling roulette we didn't have a high level roulette we didn't have a guild EST roulette we got those in patch 2.1 you know what else they got in patch 2.1 the party finder now servers were all segregated back then you couldn't travel between them or data centers unless the party finder was exclusive to the server that you were actually on but this was the introduction of the feature so I feel like it's it's worth a quick talk now what would you use the party finder for though well I could use them for treasure maps or dungeons but how about some trials because patch 2.1 is most notorious for essentially granting an extreme raid tier worth of end game content something we don't often see in odd numbered patches outside of stuff like the lubrum you know which we get and uh which we've gotten you know a couple years ago and I kind of wish we could get another one right about now but it was basically three Extreme Trials and a hard mode they've refused to call one of these trials extreme because it wasn't as difficult as the others and when you're reminded of which one it is you might agree so the ex trials were e-freet Garuda and Titan and they were all part of another questline to get another weapon one that was unrelated to The Relic like they were associated with in the are hard mode versions but was still a really good item level for the time these encounters were well even A Step Above some of the coil encounters from patch 2.0 themselves at least a lot of the community felt that way but it was insane to think that we got three ex trials and a patch and I think that's not even the last patch that would happen and I think it was at least two more I can think of across the rest of the history where that would be the case but again they technically had a fourth ex trial but they refused to call it extreme it was The minstrels Ballad ultimas Bane this is the Ultima hard mode now they like I said said it was easier so they actually only made it drop item level 80 accessories whereas 90 was the standard for the other ex trials which was just below the raid weapons and when I say it was just below I mean they actually buffed the raid weapons going into this patch to make them item level 95 so they could introduce these as level 90 weapons but that's like the majority of the content again if you were an end game player you're eating good and if you weren't any end game player you at least had some other things to mess around with now the 24-man free company housing if your free company could afford it you had the B stripe quest to log in and do daily you could do maps with friends you can start messing around with the esthetician you had all these new dungeons to do with the Duty Finder so there were some casual features in here but as you can see still a very end game leaning style of development now I don't want to get too much into features but there were some major features added in this patch I'm not going to name all of them because actually 2.1 has too many major features to even remember to name but the first one the tomestone cap the tomestone cap and Patch 2.0 was only 300 for your weekly tomes and Patch 2.1 raised it to the 450. many people are arguing now if we should raise it all the way up to 900 given about a couple months after the initial tomestone new capped Tombstone is released or we could cut the cost of the items but that's an active discussion for another video we also got Resurrection in vulnerable ability in patch 2.1 yeah in case you didn't know when you get resurrected in Final Fantasy 14 if you don't take any actions no Sprint no special skills whatever you actually are immune to most damage for five seconds so you can usually use that to ensure that you survive in case you resurrect at a bad time it doesn't always work but at the very least we had it starting in patch 2.1 now one that blows my mind you couldn't override damage over time skills or heal over time skills if their potencies were higher than the last time you cast them so let's say you casted a buffed I don't know let's let's pick a job that actually still has a DOT nowadays very few to choose from let's say that you're a gun breaker and your Sonic break was buffed by your pot okay and let's just say it was possible to use another one but you couldn't but it would it was going to be without the pot you wouldn't actually be able to override it that is a horrible example I don't know what I didn't know what else to pick I should have just picked a job from shadowbringer so Sonic break was not the good choice basically you couldn't overwrite a buff dot with an unbuffed Dot and that would mean you were forced to have down time any time you were going from a buff window to a non-buff window that was the same with heal over times which could be even more annoying because the last thing you wanted to do is have lapses in some of your healing over times especially with the way content was designed back then but that was a really big noise that was fixed in 2.1 they even raised the debuff limit to 60 whereas previously it was 30. so I talked about that in a recent video and that was a super contentious problem they also buffed dungeon exp they made it so you no longer lost your food Buff when dying yeah in 2.0 in those two months we were in coil yeah if you died you lost your food buff have to eat again I guess it makes sense and we even didn't even get a sort function for our inventory until patch 2.1 if you didn't if you weren't sure that they were playing catch-up from trying to rebuild an MMO from nearly scratch in under three years these kind of things being in the next major patch five months down the line should be somewhat of an indicator that's that's what a lot of a realm or born is going to look like as we go through the various features that being said 2.1 was lauded for its massive available content you still had people working through coil use you had all these Extreme Trials Ultima there was a lot of reasons to log in especially because a lot of players hadn't gone through and leveled all their jobs most people were still running with only one or two even if they could just sit over in uh what was the name uh Northern thanolin and do dark devices by just aoeing that fate for minutes and minutes and minutes and hours and hours and hours Oh either way I think that's a good place to stop for our first retrospective video for Final Fantasy 14. as you can tell we have a lot of ground to cover and hopefully you'll enjoy this journey as we go on it over the next several with that thank you for watching this video be sure to like favorite subscribe and share and if you want to enjoy something nostalgic from the history of Final Fantasy put in the comment section of the video below I'll see what I can do about more retrospect Style videos as we look into the 10-year anniversary with that I'll see you all in the next one and until then take care foreign [Music]

Channel: Mrhappy1227

Views: 29,575

Keywords: Square, Enix, Mrhappy, Game, Games, Gaming, MMO, RPG, MMORPG, FF, Final, Fantasy, Final Fantasy, FF14, FFXIV, Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy XIV, Guide, Tips, Tricks, How To, Lets, Play, Lets Play, ARR, A Realm Reborn, Patch 2.1, Retrospective

Id: XYCiXajmJlo

Length: 19min 38sec (1178 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023