Thinking about FFXIV quality of life...

This was a social media post but I felt like expanding on it.

So, Final Fantasy XIV has some low hanging fruit for improving the day-to-day experience of playing. I was talking about this on social media, and I feel like turning it into a full post. Not because I think anyone at Square Enix is paying attention, but just because I feel like talking about it.

This isn’t the big stuff. No reworks to jobs or fundamental changes–at least I think, I mean, it’s a video game with a more than decade old codebase, for all I know every single one of these is a nightmare–but on the surface this should all be stuff that doesn’t take anyone very long at all to fix or do.

The Obvious One

There’s almost no way that Evercold doesn’t launch with the ability to put tomestone gear into the glamour dresser as a set or the armoire, as well as various crafted gearsets that aren’t just for glam purposes.

I’m still mentioning it.

Gimme.

Almost any updates to the glamour system in general are always welcome, and there’s a lot of low hanging fruit from a user perspective. I know that it’s a mess in the backend, which is why you can’t have a dresser in a player house. Just make it work.

Consistency

Ishgard has a single aethernet exit outside of the city, for story reasons and presumably technical limitations at the time, and it’s to the ARR zone you enter it from. Not a single Heavensward region is accessible via aethernet in the city, but you can go to the housing district’s plot-related zone. Well, as of Dawntrail, it’s pretty obvious that it’s okay for story-locked and airship exits to be aethernet exits – so add them! Azys Lla, the Sea of Clouds (both sides), and Falcon’s Nest should all be available via aethernet.

The Zodiac glass for ARR relics being a physical item instead of a key item. That’s another one–just update it. Please. ARR relics in general have a few other things – I’m not saying make them “easier” but just let them benefit from things like getting to mass-meld materia onto the scroll. Add something so that you can get the replicas without having to have the actual relic in your inventory at the time.

Fix Island sprint to be an automatic action swap, just like Stellar Sprint or PVP Sprint. Really basic.

For levequest turn-ins that let you turn in more than one item, give us the same menu that later crafter quests (Crystalline Mean, etc) give – multi-select on items at once. Okay, this one is probably bigger than the rest of what I’m thinking, but this is so annoying.

Expanding Options

Make almost any enemy a viable candidate for a hunt mark bill. That’s it. I’d even be fine with “any enemy” if I’m being honest, but I could see restricting a few just because they’re rare and annoying to reach.

For allied society quests, add more variety. There’s a lot of quests where you talk to 1-3 NPCs in very set locations. Just.. make it where those NPCs can be in a few different places. For quests where there’s an item on the ground that you have to pick up in a certain zone, make those … actually move around in the zone instead of just at the same set locations every time. Adding a few more NPC varieties would go even further, but that’s got a lot more translation work involved. I still say they should go for it.

Plugins to Steal

Not necessarily endorsing Dalamud here but there’s more than a few QoL plugins that should definitely become part of the base game.

Duty Loot Preview shows the available drops from each duty. Maybe it only unlocks after you clear a duty for the first time.

Item Use shows you what items are levequest or GC turnins. It does other things too, but that would be the best functionality to port in. It shows it in the same place as the Armoire and Dresser icons.

Chill Frames lets you drop the framerate if the game is in the background. This is maybe a weird request, but the game has framerate cap settings already…

A lot of what’s in Vanilla Plus, even more than Simple Tweaks. Hide Dead Enemy Nameplates, Fade Unavailable Actions, Duty Timer, Enhanced Loot Window… But the silliest request I have? Zone Transition Labels. I’m a huge FF12 fan, and the UI things in it are fantastic – mix that with Target Lines? Let’s go. It’s a great aesthetic and makes it very obvious what your party is doing!

Fate Limit is a newer one that adds a border to where you go out of level sync range. Small improvements like that.