Summary
All Saints’ Wake has returned toFinal Fantasy 14, giving us a new spooky furnishing and some fresh gear that glamour fans are already drooling over. In past years, various iterations of the All Saints’ Wake have sometimes offered up special event dungeons that players must undertake to complete the seasonal quests. But not this year.
In what seems to be the go-to more often than not with seasonal events these days, it consists of a couple of short quests that have us running around one small map from one NPC to another. If you’re lucky with events these days, you might get told to run between NPCs onmultiplemaps for an added change of scenery. And it’s kind of sad that’s the highlight.
Most players are perfectly happy with this setup. They don’t mind these brief quests because all they want are the exclusive goodies at the end of it all, with the Night of Devilry gear the highlight this year. Sometimes the small narrative you get from the seasonal quests is decent enough, but for the most part, I can imagine players skipping through cutscenes entirely just to get it all over with.
But where are those fun, challenging seasonal quests we used to get? I miss them so much. The themed dungeon events from past All Saints’ Wakes were great, occasionally you would get a FATE or two to complete, and the Moonfire Faire obstacle course can be good fun. But I want something even more challenging.
One that stands out to me is the Make it Rain Campaign from 2021. It was this whole mystery quest where you had to speak to the right people and then choose the correct statements at the end to blow the mystery wide open. It wasn’t straightforward or easy, and I loved it for that.
There were parts that were not your usual hand-holdy FF14 that underline exactly what you need to do. We had to figure out where to go and who to talk to. I remember there was a statue I needed to examine stumping me for the longest time as I just didn’t realise that’s what I had to do. As much as I stumbled on this a bit, it felt all the more rewarding to figure it out in the end. I want that challenge back.
Part of the appeal of something like this over some of the other examples is that it’s unique and not just a rehashed version of something we’ve already had before. Granted, this would take the team a lot more work to create each time, but events like that will stay with players for years. I still think about that Make it Rain Campaign three years later and each time a new iteration comes around, I wonder if it’ll live up to that same standard. (It does not.)
There’s no perfect solution to this as, amount of work aside, I imagine plenty of players, maybe even the majority, prefer the short and sweet events as they just want the shiny new things. If every seasonal event suddenly put those rewards behind more of a skill-check type of content, it wouldn’t go down well. However, I do believe there must be some kind of middle ground.
I’d be happy if only one seasonal event out of the year was a bit special compared to the rest. Something unique that stands out and that I’ll remember fondly years later. I’m up for the challenge, Square Enix, and I bet others are too. Please, Make it Rain again.
