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Retardo? Final Fantasy XIV, at least the soundtrack is enjoyable

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  • Total voters
    69

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
I can also finally play Dark Knight. Having Classes gated behind content like this is probably the dumbest idea they had.
 

Delterius

Arcane
Joined
Dec 12, 2012
Messages
15,956
Location
Entre a serra e o mar.
So if I somewhat like the arr story Im in for a treat when I go to heavensward? I stopped playing after reaching 51 somewhere in the seventh astral questline or whatever it is called. Also I will probably like stormblood since its better than arr?
Yep.

Here's the thing about ARR.

When Final Fantasy XIV was first released it was a catastrophe on the level of the first Final Fantasy movie. Square intended it to be more than just a game. It was the successor to FFXI, their most profitable venture. It was a showcase for an engine meant to compete in the market. And it was meant to tackle both the storytelling of a post TORTANIC world and the gameplay of post World of Warcraft. While still allowing for console/PC integration. That level of investment had a lot of margin for mismanagement, and so it did.

If you look at videos from 1.0, you'll notice that the fluff and the storytelling is quite polished. Cutscenes, voice acting and so on reach a level FFXIV couldn't return to. But the gameplay was arse. ARR was a correction of it in the different direction: make something solid from a gameplay standpoint but shaft the story and the graphical polish if necessary. Back then I think Yoshida made a point about how character models and flower pots had the same amount of polygons. The same principle applies to the story.

To make matters worse, ARR is both a continuation and a fresh start. Its very samey and has the episodic monster of the week feel of a new shounen series. Without giving you reason to care much about certain characters because they were there 'from the start' while you, most likely, was not. Things pick up only at the Baelsar climax and the transition to HW.

Heavensward on the other hand is its own story, with enough breathing room for the developers to focus on the storytelling of it all. Its a competent enough tale to be engaging in an MMO. As such its pretty fun.

Stormblood is still competent. Things are still moving forward and so on. Its just that the characters you follow aren't as interesting as those from before. Though, personally, it makes up for everything ever by adding an Ivalice sidestory for the 24 man.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,662
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
So Blaine are you going to tell us about your adventures in weeaboo land or what?

Well, I've been busy recruiting for my clan, among other things. (pink text is from me -> other guy)

f1f638046d.png
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
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Messages
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Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
Might as well complain about the game, since complaining about games is pretty much the point of the Codex.

First and most definitely foremost, there is a massive wall of extremely boring fetch quests between the new player and the endgame—which, because this is a sushi-flavored blatant WoW ripoff, is the only place to genuinely progress, turn a profit of any kind (with a couple of exceptions), or actually play with other players who aren't just a bunch of random strangers who never talk and might as well be (usually shitty) bots.

There are in fact 572 Main Scenario Quests from the beginning of the game, through the expansions, and up to the end of the current patch, +/- 1 or 2 quests depending on your starting city. This figure doesn't include tutorial quests, class progress quests, side quests to unlock aether currents (needed to fly in large zones designed for flying mounts), relic quests, important side quests to unlock various advanced functionalities, important side quests to unlock various dungeons and raids, etc. With those included, you're pushing 700 boring-ass fetch quests, and all of them just to catch up with veteran players and BEGIN to grind for your endgame equipment.

Note that almost all of these quests are pretty much solo. There's little to no point in teaming up for most of them and you aren't even allowed to team up for some of them.

On the plus side, you can pay SE $25 in exchange for an item from their cash shop allowing you to skip MOST of this garbage, except for the 100+ Stormblood/current patch quests. What a deal!

To be fair, I earned many millions of gil cherry-picking the bestselling post-ARR quest rewards and selling them on the MB, so there is that. However, these quests are so boring that I've heard MANY anecdotes indicating that people's friends have quit when they reached the infamous, exceptionally shitty Seventh Astral Era line.
 

Hoaxmetal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 19, 2009
Messages
9,157
Yeah, the quest gating is awful. On one hand you have games like WoW where you still have lore progression but it's easy to lose track of it, especially when a new patch hits and you get access to new storylines even though you haven't finished the old ones. On the other - FF14 with questline that's longer than most big RPGs but with barely anything interesting happening (at least pre-expansion quests that I'm stuck at, somewhere near the end). I'd like to finally get to expansion content that I've bought but you either pay for skip or die of boredom.
 

Cromwell

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2013
Messages
5,443
Yeah, the quest gating is awful. On one hand you have games like WoW where you still have lore progression but it's easy to lose track of it, especially when a new patch hits and you get access to new storylines even though you haven't finished the old ones. On the other - FF14 with questline that's longer than most big RPGs but with barely anything interesting happening (at least pre-expansion quests that I'm stuck at, somewhere near the end). I'd like to finally get to expansion content that I've bought but you either pay for skip or die of boredom.

Its worse if you plan on playing one of the newer classes. To start a Dark Knight I had to play all the way up to heavensward and then got kicked back to lvl 30. Which meant I had now no story progression anymore because I already did all that but they expected me to grind back up to 50 to actually play from the point I already was at a week before. If you have the time i.e. no job or on vacation and are not averse to grind that may be ok, but for me the prospect of spending my 1-3 gaming hours I get on any given workday running the same fucking instances I already did again did completly burn me out and I quit.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,662
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
Oh yeah I almost forgot, I recorded a bit of the day we camped for our FC house.

It was fucking awful.

 

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