Imagine a game that's fun right out of the box... Boring right? Yeah... Let's put 150 hours of filler at the start before it gets fun.
Some business exec somewhere.
Well I mean, it’s not really like that in this case. Every story expansion just requires you to have cleared the previous parts of the game.
The base game/before the first expansion isn’t bad per se, I had a fun time with the game at that point. But there happens to be a remarkable step up in quality starting with the first expansion, and the game pretty much keeps getting better from there.
Also during the last few years they have been revamping the early-game extensively, adding modern visuals and refreshing the design of the dungeons and boss fights. But having played before these changes, I still wouldn’t call the beginning of the game “filler”. I found it quite charming, and the multiplayer aspect is also fun in its own respect at that point.
Just my 2c, I’m not one to defend large corporations but I don’t think the trope really applies to XIV
The game started 10 years ago. It was a different game back then.
Oh I see you have met my ex-wife
FF14 has an insane amount of filler in every quest. Sooooo many times you need to travel to whole different area just to have some completely inconsequential chat with an npc or they break a simple task into 10 steps with a long ass cast time that doesn't show your character doing anything. I will say the story is (after a while) quite good.
"Pray return to the waking sands" PTSD intensifies
At least they give new players aetheryte tickets to teleport directly to the waking sands now. No more teleporting to Horizon and taking public transit like some kind of peasant.
It's just so much clicking. Go here click this guy click that guy.
It's not that bad of you stay current at all times, you can do a bit of story here and there, its released in chunks outside of the large expansions.
But if you take a break for a year. Fuck me. It's just never ending. I just want to raid...
Yeah, the barrier for entry for new players is insane too. This guy once bought the game and he is like "Gonna rush through the story so lets play some dungeons next week", yeahhh.... nah, you are gonna play with us in a month maybe more. Also, you posted this comment twice, might wanna delete the other.
It's just so much clicking. Go here click this guy click that guy.
It's not that bad of you stay current at all times, you can do a bit of story here and there, its released in chunks outside of the large expansions.
But if you take a break for a year. Fuck me. It's just never ending. I just want to raid...
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.
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.
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.
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)
Someone told me something like that once: "one piece it's interesting from episode 90 onward" and he wasn't joking.
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.
That’s why you read the manga instead.
I've seen a reference to a website called "one pace" that has cut off all the filling of OP.
It's got over 1000 episodes so that's not unfair.
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.
I also love that video.
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.
The bloody banquet is still amazing though.
Yeah the last chapter of arr is when it kicked off for me
While I loved those games as a teenager with infinite free time, I now hate games that don't respect the players time. I mean, come on? Which adult has the time to play multiple 80-hour-long RPGs a year? How does one keep up with the influx of good games these days?
The fun thing about FFXIV is that it’s free to play up to level 70. You’re only gonna be missing the last 2 expansions and then the one this summer. So you get 1/2 at no actual cost to you.
You only put in as much time as you want to get out too. There’s no real downside to taking longer beside things not being “relevant” anymore.
FF13 needed a good 30 hours, it truely is mind blowing they keep getting away with it
I waited for FFXV to get good and it just kept getting worse lol
For me it was the opposite. I had low expectations and the longer I played it the more it grew on me, especially with the sheer amount of content. It’s actually probably in my top 5 FF games.
I tried 13 multiple times. Steam says I have more than fifty hours in it. I know the last time I got all the way to the open world segment. But I just can't get into it and was mostly making myself play because I bought the entire trilogy on a sale. The game's insistence on putting all the plot in a menu made it much more difficult to follow along or to get attached to any of the characters. I know I read everything as it became available and I honestly have no memory of the vast majority of it. I'm not even sure I could name the fully party.
On top of that, the gameplay itself just wasn't great. Party composition was almost always dictated by the plot and character growth was completely linear, so there was very little opportunity to experiment with the game's systems. And when I did get to experiment with it, encounters were so rigidly structured and my characters' levels being capped by plot progression meant there was no wiggle room to actually experiment. Throw in traditional FF problems like debuffs being useless and new ones like AOE attacks being heavily luck based and it didn't even have fun combat to fall back on.
Agreed on all counts.
The open world fights while easily cheesable offered enough spectacle to keep my attention, the trails were interesting to me (at least by comparison to the rest of the game) and the final boss was decent but given how little of the game that takes up it's absolutely unacceptable.
It's a shame too because all the elements of a potentially stellar game are in there but never given a chance to shine due to the reasons you mentioned.
I got 650 hours in and I’m only about halfway through the MSQ.
I just can’t anymore.
It’s too much.
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".
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
I loved the crafting system in ff14, but there is a point where you can no longer progress unless you complete the main story quests.
Congrats on coming clean :-) what do you do with all your free time now?
Hey, they released a patch to fix that! It only takes 80 hours now! Lol
He’s right though.
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.
It is not a bad game but guild wars 2 is much more fun to me if you want to compare MMOs altogether.
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.I've had fun with both. Playing the most recent expansions is on my list of things to do.
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.
I didn't mind the story, it was fine. Not anywhere near like... a Final Fantasy game... but it was okay for an MMO.
What my antisocial ass hated was mandatory dungeons in order to progress the story.
You're in luck then. All dungeons can be done with ai now.
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 think I know that fucker
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.
I stg I'm coming back once I get a job. Only made it to the first expansion.
one piece fans be like
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.
Every Final Fantasy game is a completely different game/story with different characters and different settings.
The only thing that is slightly common is their hair styles.
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.
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.
