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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.
Also why I stopped playing. The part around level 50 where it forced me to do big multiplayer raids. Nah. I just wanted to be a master craftsman!
For me, combat in that game sucked compared to ESO. But the crafting was amazing!
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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. Particularly important to me is you get to see strong examples of how their narrative structure may or may not work for you.
Specifically, there’s a point where a major event gets walked back really hard, going from “this changes the world!” to “oh nvm everybody’s fine don’t panic”. This is not a bad thing by itself, the devs ultimately want their story to be mostly positive and uplifting, but given people hyped up how “dark” the game gets I was left quite dissapointed on that front.
What part, if I may ask? Unless it’s in Endwalker, then don’t tell me.
Heavensward is definitely the part where I said “ok maybe all that was worth it”. Specifically, the Amphitheatre.
It is not a bad game but guild wars 2 is much more fun to me if you want to compare MMOs altogether.
I’ve had fun with both. Playing the most recent expansions is on my list of things to do.
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.
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.
Someone told me something like that once: “one piece it’s interesting from episode 90 onward” and he wasn’t joking.
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.
It’s got over 1000 episodes so that’s not unfair.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Oh I see you have met my ex-wife
The game started 10 years ago. It was a different game back then.
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
It’s always funny when you see the exact personification of a meme in the comments.
Not a big fan of nuance, I presume?
Bet they didn’t even play for 100s of hours before making up their mind smdh
Perhaps the confusion is my fault for acknowledging that the game did indeed improve over the course of its ten year run, which is…obviously…the best possible case scenario.
But if you read my comment again, you may notice that my point is the exact opposite of what you’re joking about. I don’t believe there really is a multi hundred hour “right of passage” to get to “the good part”. Not only is the beginning already pretty good, but, as I said, they are actively modernizing it to bring it more in line with the later parts (which are even better).
Is there a subtlety here that I have simply failed to convey? Is the idea of a decent game becoming a masterpiece really indistinguishable from the idea of a fundamentally worthless game dangling the hope of a better game out in front of you like a carrot on a stick? Really help me out here
If someone says to you that they tried playing the game for a couple hours, but it was kind of boring and the quests have a lot of filler, what would your response be?
The meme pokes fun at the idea that many people who love the game would encourage that person to continue until they reach the first expansion so they could experience that, as you call, masterpiece.
It’s not so much that they find the first part fundamentally worthless, just even if you don’t like it, you should maybe keep playing because it gets so much better.
If someone says to you that they tried playing the game for a couple hours, but it was kind of boring and the quests have a lot of filler, what would your response be?
At the end of the day we are talking about like a 600 hour story driven RPG, the actual structure of the game doesn’t change much as it goes on so you can tell pretty quickly if you’ll like the game in general (hey, that kind of sounds like, the opposite of what the meme is saying, right?).
With that in mind I would say if you aren’t thrilled with the story straight off but you otherwise enjoy the game, you may as well keep playing, and if things pick up later then hey, bonus. If you don’t like the moment-to-moment gameplay I am here to tell you that it does not get better lol. So no worries, the free trial is the way it is for a reason.
In summary, I understand what the meme is saying, but have I said that? Let’s step away from such massive games for a second. I believe the best part of Horizon Zero Dawn is the ending few hours, by far. Story just really hits for me then, as it should, because we want things to get better as we play them. Is this perspective, “the best is yet to come”, the same as, “it’s worth slogging through the boring part until then?” Have I called the beginning boring, actually? Have I suggested anyone should slog through it?
It’s just that OP has a funny joke and you are acting out the joke, which is funny to some
Yes I can see how funny it would be were it directed at somebody who embodied in any way the sentiment of the original meme. It seems to me that I have repeatedly argued the opposite, care to share any insight as to why you so easily imagine otherwise?
Hey, they released a patch to fix that! It only takes 80 hours now! Lol
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.
Ff13 need 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 think I know that fucker
