Eorzean Evening Post: Valentione's Day .

Can you feel the love tonight? Or this week at least? Players of various MMOs should be feeling the love in the air for sure – why wait for Valentine’s Day to decorate our whole virtual worlds with fuzzy feelings, hearts and balloons?

In Eorzea, which I guess no FFXIV-player has been able to miss by now, we started already last week. On February 3rd, certain members of an Ishgardian house left their war-ravaged homeland to try to spread cheer and love all through Eorzea, decorating and trying to get adventurer to run around and deliver letters of affections all over the place.

It feels a bit odd – Ishgardians don’t generally seem like the loving type, to say the least, with their plotting, scheming and isolationist policies while they fight their war against the dragons. Then again, they will need our help soon in Heavensward, so I guess it makes sense to also show off their more romantic side. Replacing heavy armor with cute, heart-covered apparel could just be the thing we need to see before we run to their side in the future.

 

Looking for love…

Valentione’s Day isn’t a very long event. Or well, it lasts quite long – from February 3 all the way up to the 16th – but as for actual content it won’t take very long to run through, unless you get really stuck somewhere. It didn’t take me more than one hour to finish the whole thing and reap the rewards.

A warning is due, though. There might be some spoilers for the event below, including screenshots. It is actually an event that you can spoil, so if you want to run through it blind you might want to take that hour to finish it up first.

The Valentione’s Day quests are relatively simple affairs. As seems to be the norm, you start the event by heading to the amphitheater in New Gridania – the other cities really need to be build something similar for themselves, Gridania must be getting a lot of tourist money for grabbing so many events for themselves! Lisette de Valentione and her helpers want you to deliver three different packages in three different locations – not surprisingly, Black Shroud, Thanalan and La Noscea. While you’re running around doing this, one of Lisette’s men are looking for his own love, a mysterious woman that once saved him from certain death on the battlefield.

 

…in all the wrong places

Finding the correct person for your delivery isn’t as straight forward as it usually is – there’s no marker on your map telling you where to go. Instead the quest giver will give you a clue, a single word, which describes where they saw the person last. The game then encourages you to talk to other players and gather information in order to find your way to them.

Every quest actually has a few different clues to choose from. When going to Ul’dah to get the Thanalan clue, I might get “saloon” as my tip, while you could get “gates”. These might lead to different characters as well, so not everyone are delivering exactly the same parcel as everyone else. It’s a nice idea and might have delayed the inevitable spoilers threads on forums/reddit/etc by at least a few minutes. La Noscea is the most “complicated”, with 12 different clues, leading to three different characters – Black Shroud being the easiest with its two different clues that both lead to the same person.

The more you know about Eorzea, the easier this becomes as well. I managed to find the correct person for my delivery in both La Noscea and Black Shroud without the aid of the Internet – I drew a complete blank in Thanalan and I looked it up. I’m not proud of myself.

If you’re a complete newcomer to the game, it might get a bit more complicated to figure out where to go. It should be said that the game wants you to talk to other players about it, so it’s perfectly fine to ask around.

What I like about this design is that not everything is served up on a platter for you. There was a quest in Duskwood in World of Warcraft that tried something similar – you gathered clues about who you should talk to, which I found really exciting. Then, once I approached the place where I figured the character would be, the whole thing was spoiled by a giant question mark over his head. Once this stuff was added to the map and mini-map, it became even more trivial.

I’m not going to get all nostalgic about a time before quest helpers and map markers – most of the time, I love them as much as the next guy. But it is nice to see quests like these from time to time, without going full Investigation mission from The Secret World (that I loved, don’t get me wrong). We can use some mystery and not just following big blinking arrows all the time.

 

The lady of mystery

The only thing that disappointed me with Valentione’s Day was the sub-plot about the mystery maiden who saved the knight after a battle. I’ve noted before that even when some of FFXIV’s quests can be mechanically simple – like the Moogle Delivery quests – the writing usually saves it and makes it worth it anywhere. Not so much here.

It just fizzled out, tried to get some cheap laughs out of the player (I did smile, I admit) and… Well, that was it. The mystery wasn’t much of a mystery at the end of the day. Knowing the writers, they could have done more with it. But considering how short the event was in general, I guess that they simply didn’t have the time our resources to do much more with it.

I’ve never taken part in Valentione’s Day before, so there might be a callback to previous years that I’m missing.

Either way, it was a cute event. And the barding you get for your Chocobo is totally worth it. That thing is sweet.