The new Field Operation Occult Crescent, a very classic MMO content in Final Fantasy XIV, is just a few weeks old. In an interview, two developers revealed that there will be more rewards, as players have constantly complained.
What kind of content is this? The Field Operation Occult Crescent is a grind-heavy endgame content connected to the special weapons of the Dawntrail expansion. The focus of the content is cooperation with other players, especially during large respawning battles. The contents of Kreszentia can be completed quickly with the right motivation, but they are actually designed for a more relaxed play over a longer period of time.
You can read everything about Occult Crescent here: Final Fantasy XIV: Occult Crescent – Everything about the new Field Operation, the Phantom Jobs, and the new Relic Weapons
In an interview with Gamesradar+, Assistant Director Tsuyoshi Yokozawa and Battle Content Designer Daisuke Nakagawa discussed the development of Occult Crescent and explained why there are now more rewards for everyone.
Rewards and Better Content Thanks to Complaints
Why are there more rewards now? In the interview, Tsuyoshi Yokozawa and Daisuke Nakagawa say that there are now many more new items as rewards in Occult Crescent. The longer you play, the more items you will receive automatically. They say they want to encourage collectors: […] we encourage completionists to see if they can obtain them all.
How are the devs approaching the development of Field Excursions? The increase in rewards is one of the improvements the team implemented based on feedback from previous Field Excursions. The development of the very first content, Eureka (2017), was extremely challenging
. Nevertheless, they received a lot of positive feedback, but also criticism: […] we also received a lot of negative feedback about gameplay being unclear and/or the content being boring.
To later develop the second iteration of the Field Excursions Bozja (2019), the devs claimed to take both positive and negative feedback from Eureka with them. Among other things, they wanted to orient the content more towards casual players. The crucial point here, however, was that there weren’t enough core elements to keep players engaged for the long term.
This resulted in a lack of content that people could really sink time into and a lower degree of freedom. In Save the Queen, we incorporated improvements on issues we experienced with Eureka, and encountered new issues raised from the community’s feedback.
In fact, the popularity of the Field Excursions surprised the developers. Initially, they assumed that this content would appeal only to a very specific group of players. Now it seems to them that more and more players are looking forward to the next version.
The developers also suspect that the Field Operations are popular in part because a lot of player feedback has been integrated. The numerous complaints and praise from the community have helped them in the development process. The fact that there are now overall more rewards has led to veterans having many items in their inventory, and duplicates are now donated to special NPCs
: A player from Final Fantasy 14 suggests that you should donate your unused items to special NPCs that are not actually NPCs
