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While it's unlikely we'll ever be seeing a Final Fantasy 14 classic to relive those painful, polygon-plenty 1.0 days, there is one neat thing that Creative Studio 3 does to revitalise some of its older content: Unreal trials.
It was introduced as part of the Faux Hollows minigame back in Shadowbringers, and essentially plucks old Extreme trials (the difficulty sits above story content and below Savage raids) and then scales them up to whatever the current level cap is. No reworked mechanics or tweaks beyond just a stat push-up and letting everyone go ham with full access to their current kit.
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I've been particularly enjoying the Unreal trials available throughout the Dawntrail expansion. They've all been from Stormblood—the only expansion I skipped in its entirety—so going through each one has essentially been like a brand-new piece of content for me to sink my teeth into, even though it's actually close to being nine years old at this point.
Not all of them are equally exciting, of course. Some of the fights, like last patch's Tsukuyomi, are painfully easy with only one major mechanic to work through. I mostly put that down to how job and fight complexity were balanced with each other back then—while the scale used to tip more towards the former, it's very much firmly in the latter these days.
But some fights feel just as fun as I can only presume they were back when it was current, and that is most definitely the case with the Unreal fight that just dropped with Patch 7.5, Shinryu's Domain. I was lucky enough to dive into it blind with a full party of my pals, only one of whom had actually done the fight back in Stormblood, and was still going in with a pretty hazy memory.
And you know what? It was an absolute blast. A dose of nostalgia mixed with the excitement of getting to learn something none of us had tried before. It's a fight that utilises cast bars as tells in ways that I just don't see from encounters of this difficulty in the game anymore, and paying attention to all of the different spreads and stacks that don't come through your standard telegraphed markers was a ridiculous amount of fun.
Sure you can still MINE these fights (minimum item level, no echo for HP and damage buffs when you die) but that also scales you down to the level they were originally designed for and, crucially, locks you out of your job's full kit. Loads of abilities have been pruned over the years, which makes some classes far worse synced down than others.
Being able to experience these at current level with every ability is an absolute joy, and ultimately it's another way to enjoy the game that I presume is also quite resource-lax for the developer. Obviously brand-new encounters are always the preference, but I genuinely love Unreal as a way to introduce older content to newer players in a way that encourages them to actually play it, rather than simply unsyncing your level for the original version and killing it in a matter of seconds. It's something I wish that Creative Studio 3 could utilise elsewhere.
The developer is pretty good at making sure most of its casual-level content is populated for newcomers thanks to daily roulettes—even if nobody is actively queueing for that random level 20 dungeon.
I'm not sure what else Creative Studio 3 could do it for. Savage has a much higher ceiling compared to Extreme—the latter of which can be bashed out from the start in a single lockout, whereas Savage raids often take hours, days, or even weeks to clear.
Maybe it's something we can see in the far-flung future, though. Upcoming expansion Evercold is introducing a third 8-player raid difficulty to slot between Normal and Savage, so who knows? Maybe in a few expansions' time those can be chucked into the rotation, too. For now, I'm just feeling all buzzed for the concept of level 110 Shadowbringers fights when Evercold drops next January.
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