Final Fantasy 14's first chaotic alliance raid—a higher difficulty 24-player fight that's adapted from one of the original A Realm Reborn raids—arrived at the end of December, and I actually like it a lot. Even if having to rely on 23 other people to consistently execute each mechanic is the definition of futile.
Well, why not make things even more difficult by deciding to swap around two ability names, nearly a month after the fight was released? I assume that's the question Square Enix asked itself, because that's what it's done. It turns out that two names tied behind one of the boss's attacks—either Core-Lateral Phase or Lateral-Core Phase—were the wrong way around in English translations.
Before today's change, the name of the cast actually indicated where the safe spots were: Core-Lateral Phase attacked the sides first and then the middle, for example, while Lateral-Core Phase did the opposite. Admittedly, I did think that was an odd choice. Usually abilities like that indicate where the attack is going to hit first, rather than where it isn't. I remember the first time seeing the attack, my thousands of hours of Final Fantasy 14 logic had me going to the opposite of what the name was actually telling me.
- Final Fantasy 14's battle designer admits they went a little overboard on streamlining fights, especially for melee: 'Our policy of reducing gameplay-related frustrations was sometimes taken too far'
- 'It's simply impossible to make a difficulty level that's just right for all players': How Final Fantasy 14's lead battle designer has been playing a precarious balancing game for Dawntrail's dungeons and raids
It does seem to have come out of nowhere, though. I checked the known issues segment for Patch 7.15 (the one that added the chaotic alliance raid) and there's nothing about the names being the wrong way around. I have to wonder why they decided to wait an entire month for the 7.16 patch to actually fix this rather than… doing it in a hotfix, especially since it seems to have been a simple text error. A Reddit comment claims that the names have been the correct way around in Japanese since launch, seemingly an English-only issue. Did they just… not notice?
It's only a simple swapsies, sure, but I've no doubt this is going to cause more than a few problems in party finder for the next few weeks. Not just from people fighting muscle memory, like myself, but folk who may not have even read the patch notes and realised that the change had happened. Things will smooth out soon enough but hey, Square Enix, maybe fix it a little faster next time, please? For the sake of party finders everywhere.
