...fascinating to me, anyway. This sort of thing hits some of my hyperfixation buttons really hard and I need a distraction right now so I wanna talk about it and no one can stop me.
(I'm sure you could stop me if you really wanted to)
I'm going to use Marauder/Warrior pictures as examples here, alongside... hang on, let me... ok, the dice say Thaumaturge/Black Mage pictures. OP is a Marauder (good choice!) and Black Mage will be an interesting contrast. All pics are sourced from FFXIV ARMOURY COLLECTION in case you want to look up some examples of your own, it's fairly complete!
So the general item theming for Critically Acclaimed MMO Final Fantasy XIV (you know the rest) starts out pretty coherent. Once you start getting your own gear, after the starting equipment, you end up in a set that looks something like this:
Or if you're a spellcaster, something like this:
These are, obviously, not incredibly striking. But they're pretty coherent, like I said, they
NO GET OUT OF HERE PHYSICAL DPS WE AREN'T TALKING ABOUT YOU, SHOO, GO AWAY
Ahem. Like I was saying, they're pretty consistent. They're decent armor and textile design, they look like something which could conceivably exist in a world, the robes are a bit shapeless but in a real-world situation, individuals would spot-alter their own with belts here and there, roll up their sleeves, and so forth. Obviously, that's a little beyond the scope of a mass-market MMO with current technology, but it's not something to complain too much about.
Except we got more like this for 50 levels.
And for every dungeon set that looked pretty decent...
...we'd get a crafted set that, er. Well.
Sometimes things were okay, as long as you didn't want to move your upper body... oh, and you couldn't wear a helmet or gloves with this piece, the armor piece in-game literally occupied all three slots...
...And sometimes you'd get a caster robe that looked... oh hey no, that's just the same robe. Again. It just looks the same.
Now, many of these pieces are able to be recolored through the dye system, and the ones you got from quests were usually pre-dyed into one bright color or another, which is fine. Good, actually! If you're going for realism, even, because nicely colored clothing is a good thing for people to have. But they all keep looking the same. All the way until right up before level 50, the original level cap for the game.
And then at level 50, a few things start to happen! See, Final Fantasy has a selection of iconic job looks, if you're not familiar, and starting at level 45-50 (and every 10 levels thereafter, at the end of each major expansion) you get that expansion's version of the iconic gear for your class. Here's the Marauder/Warrior:
And here's the Thaumaturge/Black Mage:
Quite a jump from, er...
...this literally has better stats than the Black Mage iconic armor by the way...
And then you get into the raids and things start looking Fabulous and Flamboyant in a variety of ways!
It's not unusual for "fancy and cool quality" to change once you get into the Postgame/Endgame stuff across many MMOs, so that isn't entirely a surprise. What IS a surprise is that the shift is pretty major: once you start getting into the first expansion Heavensward, your basic gear while leveling starts to look... well, if not necessarily as high-quality, certainly more INTERESTING than the previous gear.
And sometimes really neat! Now that's what I'm TALKING about!
...sometimes.
So now that we've looked at the progression, what changed? Well, basically, two things.
- First, FFXIV gates story progression behind dungeons. You don't HAVE to do literally every dungeon in the game in order to progress, many are either optional post-game or (especially in at-launch Realm Reborn) side leveling content, but you do have to do most of them, and while you can level past them you can't actually move the story along without them. Some players have no problem with this. Other players struggle with making the transition from solo-world play to dungeon-role play. This is not an essay where I pick that observation apart, but it's important to make it, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.
- Second, because of the way game markets work (again, there's a lot to go into here but I'll ask you to take it on faith for the moment) when you're at the low, mid, high-mid and even approaching-50 levels of Realm Reborn, but especially in the pre-30 segment, if you aren't a crafter yourself, you're less likely to have the cash to get the decent at-level crafted and vendor gear. If you're brand new to the game, you might not even know what to look for, gear doesn't become limited to specific classes until 45-ish, and is only limited to categories - it wasn't uncommon to see tanks in monk gear, or casters in healer gear, or sometimes people in gathering gear. Even dungeon drops were luck of the roll; you may never get what you need to "keep up" with, as mentioned above, the mandatory dungeons.
And so, sometime after the launch of Heavensward, the game developers introduced The Smith, an NPC (series of NPCs, actually) in multiple low-level spots with helpful advice for new dungeoneers.
By which I mean you talk to The Smith in one of your roles - Tank, Physical Damage, or Magical - and he gives you a series of tasks which teach you the basics of group content. Tanks learn to gather up enemies, healers learn how to keep others alive, damage learns not just how to do damage (though they probably know THAT already) but how to move away from area effects (in theory), how to interact with environmental prompts, how to prioritize targets. It's actually a pretty good tutorial set.
And in exchange for completing them, you get... CLOTHES
You're never required to get these, although there's a quest that does point you to The Smith's location as you level, but you can get 'em around level 20-ish, and they'll often last you through level 40.
So why do they look so different from the other Level 20 gear?
Essentially, because people complained! They also complained that they were getting a lot of players who didn't know how to function in dungeons, which is why the NPC was introduced in the first place, but some of the complaints was "there's not a lot of NICE gear for almost 50 levels, especially when you compare it to the Heavensward stuff" and the outfit designers took that complaint and said "you know what, you're right, here you go". It's fairly generic nice gear, and I believe it can't be dyed, but it works with a lot of looks, it's stylish and understated in a way that we wouldn't see until just-pre-expansion dungeons...
...and while it's generic, it's not AS generic as this Original-Endgame, Post-Level-50 gear (which admittedly dyes up nicely and is great for a rustic adventure look, but I mean. This is partial endgame gear, once upon a time).
So yeah, the reason it looks so different is because really it is, it came around years after the (relaunched) base game, and was revisited by a design team with very different perspectives and priorities, and that's something that I find fascinating. The game is full of really cool disjoints like that, honestly. But that's all I've got the oomph for right now, I'm going to
NO GO AWAY PHYSICAL DPS GEAR WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT YOU I SWEAR I WI-