Pretty overinflated number (most new players don’t really do a lot of side stuff until they get caught up on story) but yeah the new player experience could definitely be improved (more). I have more of an issue with how long it takes to get a decent rotation of skills. The early dungeons are very boring, even if it’s teaching you how to play the game.
Gonna repeat what someone else here said: This is a dumb, dumb complaint that clearly doesn’t understand MMOs in general, nor the slow build-up to you being a hero, nor how much better XIV is doing writing-wise than literally every other MMO. Also the side content can be really freaking good. I’ve cried a few times and got close many others— and that’s just the poignant stuff— not the hilarious or badass stuff.
XIV ain’t perfect, but this is one of the dumbest complaints someone could have about an MMO; and they picked the worst MMO to complain about the writing on.
I love FFXIV, but honestly, if I didn’t knew beforehand that Shadowbringers will be a peak story, I might have dropped the game in the swamp that is the ARR-Patch-Story. It was Heavensward that hooked me though.
Yeah, I got whiplash by how hard the story picked up at the end of the post ARR quests, and it just kept going. SB was a bit less interesting, but really good still imo.
The combat also gets so much better once you get to 70-80 on most classes. I’m glad I stuck with the game, but man, I dunno if I would do it again.
So… yeah, I get it’s 100% unreasonable to ask this, but I think it’s true that the story is great especially once you hit Shadowbringer. Won’t blame anyone for not making it though.
You can at least play to 70 on the free trial now. So you can take some breaks through some of the more laborious sections.
I do think Heavensward is where it gets good, and the story becomes more focused. ARR is a real slog though.
There’s almost enough XP in the main story quest to level two jobs. Don’t be afraid to make a tank so you can queue for dungeons faster. It’s piss easy, and the community is chill af with new players.
They did cut a lot of the slog from ARR, it’s not necessarily better because they didn’t rewrite anything they just cut it so there is context missing. As an example, if you don’t start in Uldah, you never meet the real Thancred anymore.
The actual patch series is easier to swallow because most of the dungeons got reworked to be more interesting and you’re not going to the waking sands every 2 seconds to just go back to where you just where, over something you could have told me over link shell. There’s still a lot of travel, but it’s not so bad.
I replayed through ARR as an alt character after the changes, it was before they changed the dungeons but overall the experience is easier to swallow, but again the story is a little clunkier.
i think any video game ip should get at most 4 entries (and even that’s pushing it). after 3 sequels, its time to make a new ip. much of the time, it feels like all the interesting ideas got explored in the first 2-4 games, and after that it’s just about milking the brand name.
In addition 5o what others mentioned, Final Fantasy is named for nostalgic company reasons, not necessarily for the public. Square was doing bad and going out of business, and decided to have a passion project for their last release, the Final Fantasy of theirs.
It saved the company. So in its honor, their flagship RPGs are always named Final Fantasy. While they often have Easter eggs, like Biggs, Wedge(?), Cid, Moogles, etc, the games are mostly unrelated otherwise. 14 does have tons of references to others in the series though.
Final fansty isn’t that kind of ip. Different ones are set in different universes/planets, with different casts. There’s a billion different things you can explore. One game is basically medieval, another is basically cyberpunk. The things you explore are completely different and the only similarities are the name of the ip, the names of the gods, and maybe the names of some of the characters.
There aren’t many games you can make that argument with because of the way technology has advanced so much.
Elder scrolls v skyrim was easily the most successful, but your suggestion is stopping at morrowind which is an entirely different game. Tomb raider today is a different game from when it came out. Some ways for the best some ways for the worse. But there are always new things to explore. Even if it’s just mechanically.
Sure you can make that argument over something like the yearly sports games. But these games are not yearly releases.
This kind of talk always reminds me of Josh Strife. If memory serves, if what you’re doing in the game in the first few hours isn’t fun or entertaining, it’s unlikely that it’ll be after 100 hours, because it’s very likely that you’ll keep repeating the same activities for all those hours and beyond. What usually happens is that you just get used to it, plus sunk cost fallacy gets stronger the longer you play.
Gw2 is my favourite game but if you are into high end raids, either FF14 or Wow are better in my opinion.
If you are into PvP or open world, I prefer gw2.
The thing is, One Piece does get exponentially bigger and better as the story unfolds but if you don’t like it from the start then it probably just isn’t for you.
During the darkest moments the pandemic, I needed something to take my mind off of reality. So I skipped to One Piece 500ish and just started reading. Didn’t really love it, but didn’t really hate it. Then around 600ish, it started clicking. And then by 650, I couldn’t believe I was rooting for Luffy and the Straw Hat crew.
Now I’m at 1100 and part of the extremely annoying crowd who talk about One Piece.
Man I had the opposite happen. Really liked it up until 500ish where it became mass produced hype machine with the same copy paste genre elements and over the top plots that lasted way too long.
Now I’m at the end where they started unloading action and lore because it actually has a planned ending in sight, so I’m happy again.
But for 500 chapters I was very pissed off at the amount of time I wasted reading it. I signed up for fantasy naval action, not a 700 page fake love story with 500 separate characters in Candyland and the plot progression of a boulder rolling uphill.
To be honest, the episodes are like max 15 minutes of actual content if your remove the intro, outro and all the recaps.
But One Piece suffers from what every long anime suffers, long outdrawn stories that get stretched (pun intended) over too many episodes. There are arcs lasting over 100 episodes. In those episodes, not much happens, but always something happens to try to keep the interest of the viewer. But the main culprit are the flashbacks.
Flashbacks happen so frequently in those series, it is like reading a book and every couple of pages they copy one of their pages from a previous chapter in its entirety. I too can write a 300 page book like that.
Anyway, it should be illegal for people to recommend anything with more than a 1000 episodes.
One Piece has some incredible awesome moments, but the dull moments in between don’t make up for it.
Yeah it took me ages to just stop with the mmo grind mindset. Do a bit of story when you feel like and just exist in a weird world. I’m at something like 1000 hours if I remember right and still haven’t gotten to the latest stuff
Combat doesn’t really get good until level 80. It’s such a slow burn. But the reason you need to do the 24 man raids is because it’s super important for the later story. It’s the only time they make you do an alliance raid. They don’t make you do any thing except dungeons and trials afterwards, which 99% can be done with their AI.
Luckily, the raids have a lot of people all the time and they’re so easy with maxed out level 50 stats.
Yeah I was annoyed when I found out I had to do the raids, but once I got started with them I had fun. Now that I’ve gotten past the parts where they’re slightly crucial for the story I see why they make you do it too.
For me, every single FF game took me a couple hours before I really hits.
FF3 was so incredibly hard for me to get into because it just seems like one trope after another. Then it just clicked and now it’s one of my favorites.
If you’re halfway through the MSQ then you’re already well into the parts people widely regard as good. If you’re not having a good time yet you probably never will.
I'd go as far to say Heavensward may be the benchmark for whether people will enjoy the rest of the game. It's where the voice acting and general presentation upgrades to a level that, to me, remained consistent throughout the rest of the MSQ.
Most importantly, at least to me, you get new plot twists to some earlier events which tells you A LOT about the narrative structure going forward. There's a reveal during the middle of Heavensward that basically killed narrative tension for me throughout the rest of the MSQ.
It's not that their direction there is bad, I had just gotten swept up in the "omg it gets so DARK" hype so I was dissapointed when it consistently walked back major events. It took me until the middle of Endwalker to realise "oh, right, that's not the kind of story and experience they want to tell".
Keeping details minimal because I can't for the life of me get spoiler tags to work on kbin:
In the middle of Heavensward we learn that a very dramatic death sequence that led to some major events was a ruse. The character is alive and things will quickly return to normal.
I get what they wanted, but big fakeouts like that are not my thing. It felt like the consequences were walked back so I could never take the rest of the story seriously. Anything bad that happens could just be reverted.
Endwalker has a point after a lot of stuff goes down where I was thinking "Yeah this is edgy and all, but they really held back from doing anything actually substantial" then we get introduced to a bunch of cuteness and silly things. It took until then to really settle with me that they mostly want to tell fun and uplifting stories, so making stuff look dark and dramatic but keeping the lasting impact down is more of an objective of theirs than a narrative flaw.
I can appreciate that, and a lot of other things about the game and its story, but that in particular is just not for me.
I feel like this complaint only applies to other mmoheads coming from endgame in WoW or some other MMO, or already established gamers with little to no experience with MMOs that are trying it out for the first time.
Every MMO is a slow burn at the beginning because you have little to no skills and they’re just trying to introduce you to the characters and the setting.
Meanwhile the literal thousands of newcomers fall in love with the game as soon as they start even when it’s “nothing but fetch quests” or “boring as hell” according to the aforementioned vocal minority.
Yep WoTLK on free servers for me is questing and a bit of farming to get some gold for necessities.
Back in the day I painstakingly (while having fun) managed to level up to 60 but hadn’t paid for the expansions, and then I took a break to finish a project in school, when I finally came back to WoW Cataclysm happened and everything changed, then I lost interest.
One of the reasons I really liked SWTOR, despite the many things I dislike, is the class stories give you something to keep your interest really early on. I’ve never really been able to get in to other MMOs that are mechanically similar because I’m bored out of my fucking mind with only a promise of potentially interesting end game content.
Every few years someone talks me into trying WoW and I spend one miserable night leveling then wondering why on earth anyone does this.
I came from WoW (after leveling every class through Shadowlands), and when I started FFxiv, I was thinking “it’s not amazing, but it’s better than WoW at this same level.” It was still fun to play, and it wasn’t a straight slog, the whole story ramped up over time.
And then I hit the first expansion, and it was better than most of WoW except maybe Legion (my favorite expansion). There was a moment, right before a trial, where you’re on a bridge and the music ramps up (anyone who has played probably knows what I’m talking about), and I had to just sit and let it wash over me for awhile before queueing up. Just standing on a bridge, hearing a song telling the whole story I had learned over an entire expansion.
And then it just continued ramping up. So it starts out about equivalent to WoW and then gets better at a much faster rate. And then, when you finish the main story quest, instead of the choice of “mythics or raids, that’s all you get, hope you like dungeons,” You find there’s more to do outside of the main story quest than in. There’s so much to do.
If a game isn’t interesting from the start, then the game is badly designed.
MMO’s are made for people who can put multiple hours a day into it. To them having to grind is part of the course. For everyone else it is a waste of time.
Just imagine having to grind 8 hours for a specific item. To someone who can only play a single hour a day after the kids are asleep, that is an entire week of playtime. It just isn’t worth it when they could have spend that same amount of time on a different game where they got to kill like 5 bosses.
It is interesting from the very start though. My point is that players from those two camps are biased in thinking that it’s not because there either too accustomed to having everything or they’re not aware of how the genre works.
Maybe some MMOs are made for people with all the time in the world, like no-lifers and teenagers, but the topic is about FFXIV. XIV has been designed with the working man in mind since at least ARR, it is very much expected to be played in short bursts (people with jobs generally play video games about 2-4 hours a day.) In that span of time you can easily progress a fair amount through the Main Scenario Quest or do dailies which would be the equivalent of “killing 5 bosses,” if not more. Each expansion averages at around 40-50 hours of MSQ, so even assuming the least amount of gameplay time, it takes about a month to complete, barely any different than any other major video game release, for example, Tears of the Kingdom takes approx. 55-70 hours to beat.
Not sure what you’re referring to with the grinding “8 hours for a specific item” thing, unless you’re talking about savage raiding which is endgame, not the beginning/middle (the story) like we’re all talking about and isn’t required to do the story. Even then, there’s plenty of people with jobs that will dedicate upwards of 6 hours to raiding.
Came here to say this, the complaint has no idea how MMOs work (not to mention how much better and more story XIV has, even in— and sometimes especially in— all the side content)
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