I haven’t forgotten the request to do a piece about Nael Van Darnus, it’s still in the works, but I want to wait until a little later in the screenshots to put it up. So it’s coming!
In the meantime, I was looking for other bits to look back on and got to thinking about the later patches when we had to go killing Atomos at some of the outlying Aetherytes. And then I remembered why teleporting in general was a big pain in the butt in 1.0, aside from the five minute+ waits toward the end due to server loads.
(uploaded by RydiaMist on Youtube)
Anima. This is something many of you are familiar with now as part of the later relic quests. The devs seem intent on making this word synonymous with anguish.
In 1.0, Anima was what you used to teleport from one location to another that you previously visited and attuned to. You started with a pool of 100 Anima, and depending in where you were teleporting to, it would cost up to 6. This was only reduced by setting an Aetheryte camp as a Favored Location, similar to how it works now. Town Aetheryte costs were also less than ones in the field.
Suffice it to say, by making steady progress, it was easy to eat through your Anima quickly, and you only regained 1 point every four RL hours, regardless of whether you were logged in, logged out, or resting in an inn room under either circumstance. Greater recovery of Anima didn’t occur until almost the end when Hamlet Defense was introduced, during which you could regain anywhere from 3 to 100 total Anima. Some could also be recovered after fighting Atomos.
Hamlet Defense will be covered in a separate post at another time.
Also, as previously mentioned in my post about the new PVP map Lichenweed, Aetherial Gates (I called them nodes, my mistake) were also an option in some of the larger overworld areas. You couldn’t teleport to one of them directly, but you could access them from the main Aetheryte in an area - for example, Camp Horizon to Nophica’s Wells - at the additional cost of 1 Anima, unless the Gate spawned as a result of finishing a leve.
Aetherpass key items could be purchased in town for 3000 GC seals to use the Aethernet, which is just the smaller Aetherytes scattered around the major cities which are now freely accessible in 2.0/3.0. These passes were also buyable from a black market Qiqirn for 4000 GC seals, or a whopping 400k gil.
So is it better in 2.0/3.0? Most definitely. Unless we really wanted to take our time getting from Point A to Point B on a chocobo or Goobue to conserve Anima, it became a challenge at times to make significant progress. By comparison, the cost of a few hundred easily replenished gil is a small price to pay for the frustration of getting stranded in the outer reaches of Coerthas with no ability to teleport.
