I never got into WoW’s pet battle system. I understand people got really excited about it, but by the time it was a thing I was already mostly checked out of the game and didn’t care much for the pokemon-alike gameplay. I like pokemon, but I can just play pokemon. As a result, I didn’t expect to enjoy FFXIV’s pet battling system; I figured it was going to be another pokemon-alike, but it isn’t even close.

It’s more of a slow-paced real-time strategy game than anything, and it’s really interesting to me how it’s set up. The basic premise is that you’re summoning your battle pets in various numbers onto the field, and you’re attempting to take out three enemy crystals, before they take out yours. It’s a simple, MOBA-like setup.

Minipets fall into one of four categories– “critters”, which are strong against “poppets”, which are strong against “monsters”, which are in turn strong against critters. Finally, there are “constructs”, which are neither strong nor weak against anything. Every minipet also has a special ability, which is usable only if you have a group of four of them together, and only once they’ve charged up enough. It creates a bit of a balancing act between having well-balanced groups of battle minions and skewing heavily towards a certain type to benefit from special abilities.

Each minion costs a certain number of points, ranging from 10 to 30 (I don’t think I’ve seen any costing more than 30, but I could be wrong), and you have an overall maximum number of points you can have active at a given time. At the start of the match, you can pre-summon up to a certain point value’s worth of minions, which will appear instantly when the match starts. Thereafter, you can summon further minions by queuing them, like a build queue in Starcraft.

It’s a heavily tactical game, since you can summon whatever minions you like provided you have points for them (and have appropriately set up your bar). Some minions are strong against structures (like the crystals you have to destroy), others are strong against other minions, and others have more support-style skills.

Compounding the tactical part of the game are two more non-critical structures, which are close to the enemy’s deployment areas and, when destroyed, either make the crystals more vulnerable or remove the enemy’s ability to see where your minions are, unless they’re very close to them. It gives you some options to gain an edge, provided you can commit the forces to it.

A crystal can only be damaged if there are no enemy minions in its immediate vicinity, but only the crystals in the center overlap. This means that you often have to choose between offense and defense, and it’s possible to overwhelm an opponent by rolling around with a huge death ball of minions or by spreading your forces out.

It’s been an interesting game to play thus far, and I’ve got a few nice, powerful rare minions to work with. Unleashing a swarm of tonberries and bombs is every bit as satisfying as you might imagine.

Final Fantasy XIV launched its newest major patch this past week. I only got into it over the last couple of days, because Fallout, but I spent most of the evening futzing about, checking out the new stuff. A patch for FFXIV tends to be surprisingly big, in very subtle ways. For example, here’s what was added in the latest patch:

• A new casual raid
• Two new dungeons
• About two hours of new Main Story Quest content
• A (hugely detailed) pet battle minigame
• A new set of rep grind daily quests
• A new extreme-mode raid boss
• A new guild questing airship zone
• A bunch of new crafting items
• Frankly, more crafting stuff than I can even begin to process
• Several new guild projects
• Several new micro-games in the Gold Saucer
• New Triple Triad cards and opponents
• Several new character customization options
• New flying mounts
• New minipets
• New sightseeing locations (I honestly have no idea what this part of the game is)
• New emotes
• A medium amount of class balancing
• A huge amount of refreshment of older content
• A new screenshot camera system, complete with synchronized poses (!)

It’s a truly huge list. Individually, any of these things are a fairly small bit of content (except possibly the airship zone?), but as a whole it’s quite a lot of stuff to do. It’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed with the game– even taking a little short of two months off after catching up in Heavensward, I’m still interested in hopping back in and trying out the new stuff.

One thing that’s struck me, though, is that the way I’m approaching the game is significantly different from my last break. When I came back from my last break, there was a ludicrous amount of catching up to do, to the point where it was several major patches before I’d caught up. In a couple of days, I’ve made a pretty good dent in the “major” additions this patch, those being the story quests and one of the new raids. Another night and I’ll probably have the rest of the dungeons, too. Even after that, there will be a ton of stuff to do, and best of all, I won’t feel like I HAVE to do it to “keep up”.

I tend to check out of a game when I start feeling obligated to play it, which is where I was at before I took my break. I’d hungrily devoured the Heavensward content and had played almost all of the existing new content; what was left was to grind daily dungeons to slowly get a new set of fancy gear, for the hardest of content available. FFXIV has a notoriously punishing leading edge of content, and I’m just not that hardcore anymore. Rather than hopping in once a week, or less, I opted to take a break entirely and come back refreshed. I honestly expected that I would jump in, see the new content, and check out again, and perhaps I still will.

However, I came back to find the guild still humming along fine and happy without me, which was great to see, and I’ve caught up on the content I feel like I “have” to do, for the most part. As a result, I’m finding myself curious about the other fun things out there, and I feel like they’re going to be more fun than obligation. It’s a good feeling, and I’m more enthused about logging in than I expected I’d be. The game feels like home: familiar, and not shiny or new or necessarily flashy and exciting, but comfortable and welcoming. It’s okay that I was gone for a bit; my room’s still made up the way I left it and I can hop back in, no problem.

I’ve consciously tried to keep a moderate pace in FFXIV, playing when I want to and no more, and it’s kept me interested in the game rather than burning myself out. Our raid is still on hiatus– I’m not actually sure there’s much raid for us to even *do*, maybe the new extreme boss or scheduled guild airship zone nights, but I’m okay with that. There’s enough to do and play without the need to try to keep up with “progression content” right now.