A decent MMO plagued by some serious problems that make it unplayable in the long run

[Val the Moofia Boss]

1. Inventory management.

Having to lug around at least 20 different armor sets will do that. Constantly getting drops from dungeons exacerbates the problem. Having an inventory for your armor sets is a band aid but I still get so many armor pieces so fast that they begin filling up my regular inventory. And all of the trash item drops too. FFXIV isn't GW2 levels of bad where I have to stop every 2 hours and spend 30 minutes cleaning out my inventory, but it's still bad.

I hate the inventory micromanagement minigame I'd rather all greys be removed from the game, and equipment with stats simply be removed. They're all just boring stat sticks anyway. Level scale the player instead.

5. They broke Lyse's spirit by making her Lyse.

Yeah, old Lyse was much more enjoyable to watch, though the writers would have needed to have given her a replacement straight man for her character to bounce off of. New Lyse competes with Alisae in the same character archetype and I already like Alisae more so that's a losing battle.

6. The intro to stormblood is just such a downer. "Welcome to this refugee camp"!

I personally liked that feeling crossing the border to infiltrate North Korea, and the people being so weary and having lost so much that they don't want to dare hope and take risks again.

8. Welcome to our underwater zone!

You disliked the Ruby Sea? But, the underwater cities and the coral reefs and the fish and piano music by Chopin was great! But if you're talking about the one long mandatory dive in the salt lake in the Lochs, then yeah I can see people not being too enthused by that one.

11. "It gets better"... it so does. But how am i supposed to know this when im spamming two buttons for 25 levels?

Agreed. ARR could do with an actual revamp (not just pruning 20 quests) so that the acclaimed story people everyone talks about is actually interesting earlier on, and so that people's job gameplay is fun before reaching Stormblood about 200 hours into the game.

12. Why is coils not on the msq? but finding crystal brave members is? "WHY? Why is water in fire? WATER IN FIRE? WHY??!?" No but... why? Alphi can just tell us he's found the crystal braves and organised it in a speech bubble. 2.3 is now the coils...

Historically, the Coils were raid content and harder than normal difficulty raid content of today, so it would have been questionable to have made it mandatory. Today almost all of FFXIV's normal mode content is laughably easy and can be made mandatory with no problem. Otherwise, Coils isn't really relevant to the story of FFXIV. It's relevant to the backstory and to giving closure to 1.0 players, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the Ascians or Hydaelyn or whatever.

13. (i know im missing some real clangers! please help remind me!)

Game is braindead easy.

No raids (as in, actually besieging and storming the castle, going through the hallways and exploring treasure rooms and torture rooms and freeing prisoners and such, climaxing with you confronting the final boss at the end).

Your character job/class levels up 50/60/70/80 times, but it feels like you barely progress each time you level up. Getting a new ability every other level doesn't feel meaningful when you already have 30 and almost all of them don't do anything notable. Tedious.

14. So is there a consolidated website where i can find out about glamours, items and stuff in game i really want to farm? What do you mean 'lol'?

Go to this site to see every armor set and weapon in the game. Click the Japanese flag at the top right to set the language to English.

Go to this site to see people's custom transmogs/glamours.

17. I just logged in. Since i bought shadowbringers (and have only had a sub during shadowbringers): I HATE the login screen. I wish i had the arr log in screen. (sure, its a personal complaint, but sometimes we need to vocalise our feelings!). Can endwalker be more chill, perhaps? please? I HATE that login screen. Heartfelt. I detest it. Its obnoxious and garish.

Yeah I wish I could permanently set the login screen to the ARR one.

[Echo of Soul]

Ryne and Gaia are both underage, though...

They're also fictional.

[Dartz1979]

Ryne and Gaia are both underage, though...

nah they arent underage if you look at how they act in game they are much older

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Heretics! FFXIV only has one true waifu, and she's mine. She isn't good. She's the best! The hottest of them all. Her eyes rollback when I caress her face. She can cook food like no other.

The perfect waifu:

Spoiler: 

[Swnem]

Reasons that ff14 is a massive shit show (without referencing end game content at all).

1. Inventory management.
2. ARR job pacing (and skill doling - thats a word! (i really thought it wasnt, but spell check said nothing.)
3. ARR (and post ARR) quest pacing (kinda forgivable when you know they fixed this game in like a year from almost nothing, but still, its been... 7/8 years? I know theyve more important shit to do like delaying patches and ultimates, but its still something they should fix).
4. VA direction in ARR. (fixed - happy checkmark!)
5. They broke Lyse's spirit by making her Lyse.
6. The intro to stormblood is just such a downer. "Welcome to this refugee camp"!
7. That one Aethyr current in the Lochs.
8. Welcome to our underwater zone!
9. The new player experience isnt awful, but its pretty overwhelming. ('so i do the msq, and these blue quests... wait! not ALL the blue quests? So which blue quests do i need to do? Oh, i need to look online for an unlock table... i see, i think!'...)
10. Streamer privileges! Pilav got 3 mini cacpots in a row! Hazel got a mini cacpot on her second try. Ive gotten THREE, ever (in like 100 attempts)! i could have had a total of FOUR (i missed one). This is sus!
11. "It gets better"... it so does. But how am i supposed to know this when im spamming two buttons for 25 levels?
12. Why is coils not on the msq? but finding crystal brave members is? "WHY? Why is water in fire? WATER IN FIRE? WHY??!?" No but... why? Alphi can just tell us he's found the crystal braves and organised it in a speech bubble. 2.3 is now the coils...
13. (i know im missing some real clangers! please help remind me!)
14. So is there a consolidated website where i can find out about glamours, items and stuff in game i really want to farm? What do you mean 'lol'?

15. Please add your bozja and eureka and general end game gripes. I dont plan to do any of it as a pure 'plot watcher'. But i know its definitely a thing.
16. Pvp lol. I watched zepla tell me it was really fun as an unkillable whm. Then i watched savix.
17. I just logged in. Since i bought shadowbringers (and have only had a sub during shadowbringers): I HATE the login screen. I wish i had the arr log in screen. (sure, its a personal complaint, but sometimes we need to vocalise our feelings!). Can endwalker be more chill, perhaps? please? I HATE that login screen. Heartfelt. I detest it. Its obnoxious and garish.

I actually enjoy Bozja quite a lot.
In short, it's very much like a new WoW patch zone. Except, it has it's own raids too.
It is very much grind content, but it's optional. As all optional content it has it's own progression system.
If you only want to see the story and the raids i'm sure you can do that in 1 or 2 weeks depending on your play time. But, it's also a great way to get catch up gear for alt jobs.
Of course, if you do like grinding, there is the whole relic weapon chain.

[ippollite]

Having to lug around at least 20 different armor sets will do that. Constantly getting drops from dungeons exacerbates the problem. Having an inventory for your armor sets is a band aid but I still get so many armor pieces so fast that they begin filling up my regular inventory. And all of the trash item drops too. FFXIV isn't GW2 levels of bad where I have to stop every 2 hours and spend 30 minutes cleaning out my inventory, but it's still bad.

I hate the inventory micromanagement minigame I'd rather all greys be removed from the game, and equipment with stats simply be removed. They're all just boring stat sticks anyway. Level scale the player instead.



Yeah, old Lyse was much more enjoyable to watch, though the writers would have needed to have given her a replacement straight man for her character to bounce off of. New Lyse competes with Alisae in the same character archetype and I already like Alisae more so that's a losing battle.

I personally liked that feeling crossing the border to infiltrate North Korea, and the people being so weary and having lost so much that they don't want to dare hope and take risks again.

You disliked the Ruby Sea? But, the underwater cities and the coral reefs and the fish and piano music by Chopin was great! But if you're talking about the one long mandatory dive in the salt lake in the Lochs, then yeah I can see people not being too enthused by that one.

Agreed. ARR could do with an actual revamp (not just pruning 20 quests) so that the acclaimed story people everyone talks about is actually interesting earlier on, and so that people's job gameplay is fun before reaching Stormblood about 200 hours into the game.

Historically, the Coils were raid content and harder than normal difficulty raid content of today, so it would have been questionable to have made it mandatory. Today almost all of FFXIV's normal mode content is laughably easy and can be made mandatory with no problem. Otherwise, Coils isn't really relevant to the story of FFXIV. It's relevant to the backstory and to giving closure to 1.0 players, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the Ascians or Hydaelyn or whatever.

Game is braindead easy.

No raids (as in, actually besieging and storming the castle, going through the hallways and exploring treasure rooms and torture rooms and freeing prisoners and such, climaxing with you confronting the final boss at the end).

Your character job/class levels up 50/60/70/80 times, but it feels like you barely progress each time you level up. Getting a new ability every other level doesn't feel meaningful when you already have 30 and almost all of them don't do anything notable. Tedious.

Go to this site to see every armor set and weapon in the game. Click the Japanese flag at the top right to set the language to English.

Go to this site to see people's custom transmogs/glamours.

Yeah I wish I could permanently set the login screen to the ARR one.

Yeah, i was probably in burnout around the ruby sea. But also, i was obsessively hyper focused on getting my aethyr currents as soon as possible. And that meant a lot of swimming... To be fair though, i dont think i realised i could mount up underwater and basically treat swimming like flying until i was in too deep ('scuse the pun). Also, pirates isnt my thing. Once i hit Yanxia though and the theme hit, it was like i was finally washing the grime from the stormblood opening. I had no more complaints... well, that one aethyr current in the Lochs which your compass always leads you to, but is on top of some bridge you need to go half way around the zone to find the path for.

Yeah, old Lyse was much more enjoyable to watch, though the writers would have needed to have given her a replacement straight man for her character to bounce off of

If only ff14 was designed by people who understood tsukkomi/boke. This is the problem of living in Tokyo. They need more osakans on staff.

On the point of armor... the amount of chests i have from heavensward and beyond... im scared to open them in case they give me 50 items and fill up my constantly dwindling armory space. I now understand glamor, but if you're a new player... the amount of stuff you need to delete just to function (and accept new items) is heartbreaking.

- - - Updated - - -

I actually enjoy Bozja quite a lot.
In short, it's very much like a new WoW patch zone. Except, it has it's own raids too.
It is very much grind content, but it's optional. As all optional content it has it's own progression system.
If you only want to see the story and the raids i'm sure you can do that in 1 or 2 weeks depending on your play time. But, it's also a great way to get catch up gear for alt jobs.
Of course, if you do like grinding, there is the whole relic weapon chain.

Can i has some complaints though so we can put to bed the lie that ff14 is 'impeccable'? Lets make this the best, most savagely brutal complaints thread in these forums. Constructively, of course. Sarcasm is fine, Koji understands sarcasm (evidenced by every other (but one) line of English text in the game).

[Val the Moofia Boss]

On the point of armor... the amount of chests i have from heavensward and beyond... im scared to open them in case they give me 50 items and fill up my constantly dwindling armory space. I now understand glamor, but if you're a new player... the amount of stuff you need to delete just to function (and accept new items) is heartbreaking.

Once you finish 4.0, you will unlock a new area that you can go to and vendor the gear you don't want for questline progression (completing that area's questline requires that you vendor a total of 270,000 gil worth of gear, but it's timegated as you can only vendor up to 20k in gold per week).

[Tojara]

Finishing the complete MSQ and I have to say, the inventory in this game is just completely awful. Luckily I don't really care too much about transmog/glamour so I can sell off or delete most of my items that I'll never use. The counter balance to this is that getting everything in this game is both very predictable and pretty easy considering how the gear system works in the game. For somethings (especially older content) I'm okay with, but I'm not sure if I truly like that approach if/when I play the game when everything is current.

To be perfectly honest dungeons in this game are fairly lack luster. For a single experience, half of them are really quite atmospheric and cool, but it falls off the shelf to me immediately after. There's no sense of adventure in the dungeons, and pretty much every single dungeon experience can be summed up with half a dozen 2-4 mob pulls between each of the three bosses in the dungeon.

Before I critique anything else I'll likely just have to wait for the rest of my friends to cap out so we can experience some of the raiding content together. Alliance raids as a whole, just like dungeons are cool the first time, but not something I have any genuine interest in doing multiple times. What I'm looking forward to is just jumping through the raids and trials with an organized group at some point, because for the most part (aside from ARR and some of HW) all of the encounters are pretty cool, and I look forward to doing them on higher difficulties.

That's just me though. I've come to realize that this game is basically a buy, then quit, then pick back up again when an appropriate amount of content I enjoy is out again (which is fine). WoW would be the same to me if dungeon content was lackluster and I truly disliked the combat system, but it isn't. FF14 however has a really good story and pretty great trials/raids (not Alliance raids), which is pretty much enough to keep me coming back every once and awhile, even if I'm sort of luke warm on how combat feels in the game.

To each their own though. I realize that people play games for different things and even in WoW, I don't care about collecting things. So housing, crafting or collection systems are never going to attract me or make me go out of my way to grind things that I don't really have fun with. Maxing everything out also isn't really that appealing to me because there are certain roles in WoW, or jobs in FF14 that will just never appeal to me.

The things this game does well, it does really well though. The difference between WoW and FF14 is that FF14 setups it's villain and theme early, then generally finishes it when you finish the leveling experience. WoW doesn't do this and has you play for a year and a half before reaching the ultimate conclusion of that expansions story, with cliff hangers generally along the way. FF14 sums up it's story at the start, concludes some loose ends in the aftermath, and then uses the last few patch cycles to expand upon what's next. As much of a meme as it is, the way that FF14 does flying is just a lot better too. WoW would be much better served if finishing the campaign, and exploring the zone shortly after the expansion launch would unlock flying. Instead we have to wait 6-12 months to unlock flying in these zones when it becomes mostly irrelevant.

[Swnem]

Once you finish 4.0, you will unlock a new area that you can go to and vendor the gear you don't want for questline progression (completing that area's questline requires that you vendor a total of 270,000 gil worth of gear, but it's timegated as you can only vendor up to 20k in gold per week).

Or save the vendor gold bits you get from quest rewards. Their worth gets doubled by it. It was easy peasy cause i had saved mine up.

- - - Updated - - -

Can i has some complaints though so we can put to bed the lie that ff14 is 'impeccable'? Lets make this the best, most savagely brutal complaints thread in these forums. Constructively, of course. Sarcasm is fine, Koji understands sarcasm (evidenced by every other (but one) line of English text in the game).

Did someone say it was though? xD

If we are talking about the perfect videogame my vote goes to Xenogears.

[Echo of Soul]

Thank you for the infos... but would it be sad if i said, i want to keep it all in some kind of cloud database tied to my character... Since ive seen you on the wow forums, i know you know what i mean (transmog - its just better in every single way, i mean, once you understand it, sure glamour makes some sense... but theres perhaps a better way?), Categorically, this is maybe (so far) the one absolute QOL system where wow dunks on ff14.

ETA: Jeryk, best husbando. If we kill him off im gonna be mad.

There are a lot of things in FF14 that could've been designed better but okay:isch is fine since the whole package is so good.

[korijenkins]

Lots of big differences from previous "WoW killers".
2. Past "wow killers" like LOTRO, SWG, GW2, etc. all released with zero or limited end game content. People would play to the end then go "So... what do I do now?" and then the devs would take 10 months getting any real raiding or grinding content out, at which point players would have already gone back to WoW. Those games had no problem roping players in. The reason they never took off was they could not retain players with zero content to do at end game.

It's ironic you mention GW2, which is arguably the best MMO currently on the market and has no sub. The main reason it struggles has nothing to do with a lack of endgame content, but a lack of player imagination and understanding of it. Most zones have large-scale events that were/are the effective endgame content, not to mention the crafting system for legendary items and high-level gear.

FF is literally getting attention solely because it was the most recent release and Asmongold played it. As far as I know it has nothing GW2 doesn't also have and do better in many cases. Plus it has a sub, which is an enormous negative in my eyes at this point. No game is so good it deserves to suck from my wallet's tit every month.

[Vasilisa]

Why there always has to be a "Wow killer?" I think FF is awesome and I'm having tons of fun while playing it. However it's been on the market for 10 years, neither FF nor any other game will "kill" Wow. If anything will do it it's Blizzard themselves with their decisions. Still it would be better if Wow remains good with healthy community. Nothing boosts game's quality better then a decent competition.

@korijenkins - I've spend many, many, many hours in GW1 and loved it. For a long time I've been really enjoying GW2 as well (until the end of 1st expansion). For me, repetitive need to have the feelings of progress. With GW2's gear system where my Bis from core game was also a bis in 1st expansion I've been only doing story each time new chapter got released but stopped doing this after a while due to investing more time in other games and rl.

[Swnem]

It's ironic you mention GW2, which is arguably the best MMO currently on the market and has no sub. The main reason it struggles has nothing to do with a lack of endgame content, but a lack of player imagination and understanding of it. Most zones have large-scale events that were/are the effective endgame content, not to mention the crafting system for legendary items and high-level gear.

FF is literally getting attention solely because it was the most recent release and Asmongold played it. As far as I know it has nothing GW2 doesn't also have and do better in many cases. Plus it has a sub, which is an enormous negative in my eyes at this point. No game is so good it deserves to suck from my wallet's tit every month.

That really isn't true. FF was growing and getting positive vibe before Asmongold. That is why he decided to try it.

As for GW2, no. It's terrible, sorry. I say this with much pain cause i loved the first one.
The lack of trinity and vertical progression affects the enjoyment of cooperative content and fails to keep players coming back after a break.
Also, tell us how good that inventory system is. We're waiting. Inventory management is half that game.
The systems are chaotic and the maps end up getting repetitive. The same with the story, which is lets go kill this dragon, then the next and then the next.tye content generally revolves around collec-a-tons.
Getting a profession geared up in ascended is an exercise in frustration especially when a balance patch comes out and changes the meta.

No, GW2 is insanely frustrating. That is why it never was the next best thing. I used to say GW2 is alright as long as you don't delve deeply into it. The maps are fun for a spell, but those systems will get you to stop playing.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It's ironic you mention GW2, which is arguably the best MMO currently on the market and has no sub. The main reason it struggles has nothing to do with a lack of endgame content

I don't consider the Grindaries or the mastery grinds to be fun content. GW2 is in the same boat as FFXIV where once you've done all of the story content, there isn't any meaningful content left to do besides repeatable content (ie grinds for grindness' sake). GW2's story content has awful writing, less interesting characters (Rytlock and Canach are the only memorable characters) and way shittier presentation than in FFXIV (lol the cutscenes). The one thing will give GW2 is that their setpieces are pretty good, be it running through the jungle being chased by a spider lady, or jumping from rock to rock across an abyss towards Mordremoth's tower, or jumping into Mordremoth's mind, or assaulting Kralkatorik, and so on.

Most zones have large-scale events that were/are the effective endgame content

Doing Vinewrath or Mouth of Mordremoth your first time is fun. Doing it a hundred more times isn't.

not to mention the crafting system for legendary items and high-level gear.

I will give GW2 that once you obtain your pinks, you can never have to worry about gear ever again. The inventory micromanagement is 10x worse than FFXIV, though.

FF is literally getting attention solely because it was the most recent release and Asmongold played it.

The last time GW2 got a lot of hype was when HoT released in 2015. After that, it got a small amount of publicity with PoF's launch, 4 years ago. GW2 has been pretty much forgotten since. The only outlet talking about it was that one writer for Massively OP who talked about the episode releases (I think the name of his column was Flameseeker Chronicles?), and that was it.

FFXIV's rise in popularity began around Stormblood. You started seeing more and more coverage of each patch and live stream, way more than GW2 ever got with its patches and LWS episodes. And then in 2019 news publications began lapping up every FFXIV interview or tidbit they could find. And then the word of mouth reviews about ShB really began making the game balloon in 2019/2020. Asmongold is just the latest line in a long train of events.

As far as I know it has nothing GW2 doesn't also have and do better in many cases.

• +++ I can play every class/spec/job on a single character. In GW2 you have to jump between multiple characters. Class design in GW2 is really muddled because - like WoW - each "class" is actually like 3+ different classes because of the specializations. You have to spend hours and hours watching youtube videos, levelling up to 80, grinding to unlock the specializations, reading guides on all of your combos and playstyles, and then have to spend time testing them out, just to figure out if you even like the playstyles. With FFXIV you can easily just unlock the job, go into PotD or the Wolf's Den, and find out within 10 minutes whether or not you will like the job. Also way easier for the devs to design for.

• + FFXIV's story isn't the most amazing thing ever like the cultists make it out to be, but there are very few other games right now - even singleplayer ones - with the standards of quality that FFXIV has. From voice acting to cutscene presentation and so forth. GW2's story is a joke. It's even more infuriating if you've actually played GW1, and then go into GW2 and realize what a joke the lore has become. Charr apologism, every race working together, and so on.

• + Instanced content in FFXIV is miles better than GW2. Now, I'm not saying FFXIV's instanced content is WoW levels of amazing, but it is still good nonetheless. It's easy but not braindead boring or tedious grinding like GW2.

• +/- This is an opinion, but I don't think GW2's action combat is an improvement over FFXIV's more traditional combat.

• ++ Great music. Masayoshi Soken's soundtrack is overall legit great. Up there in my top 5 game OSTs. GW2 only really ever had Jeremy Soule during vanilla, and after that it goes bad. The only GW2 song after he left that I can recall is the Mordremoth final battle theme.

• + I know people make fun of FFXIV's special effects, but battles aren't visually incoherent like this:

Plus it has a sub, which is an enormous negative in my eyes at this point.

GW2 effectively has a subscription model as well. If you're not actively playing, then you have to pay for each episode you missed. Each episode is only like $2 but it adds up. If you join GW2 now, you have to drop $30 to buy the base game, and then you have to buy 4 seasons of episodes. That's easily going to run you over $100. And then you have to drop more money because how predatory GW2's cash shop is, buying extra bank space and unbreakable mining tools and so on. Yes FFXIV puts mounts and cosmetic armors on their story but the gameplay and systems aren't designed to infuriate you to the point that you have to pay for convenience. Ultimately with FFXIV, you can buy the game for $50, beat it before your subscription service runs out, and then drop it. Or stay subbed, or whatever. With GW2, you have to drop $100+ at least in order to access all of the content, and due to the grinds you will have to spend way more time playing GW2 then you reasonably should.

- - - Updated - - -

Other things


There are a few things I do really miss from GW2. For one, the Charr. They're an actual beastman race I can play. I love beastmen races, but sadly very few games do beastmen right. They're usually just humans with animal heads. Not so in GW2. The Charr have inhuman faces, are hunched over, have different anatomy from a human, and so forth. They even run on all fours! They actually feel like beastmen.






FFXIV's attempt at "beastmen" in that regard is rather pathetic. They're essentially just humans with rubber animal masks on. I wish I loved Hrothgar like I loved Charr, but alas. Mind as well just play which variation of human I prefer the most (Lalafell, or right now, old man Elezen).


Also, when it comes to sparkly weapons, GW2 has FFXIV beat.

• When you draw the shortbow, Chuka and Champawat, the two tiger spirits will roar and jump into the bow, making it glow and enlarge slightly. Rather than shooting arrows, the shortbow shoots out tiger spirits that run towards the target. The wielder also leaves behind claw marks as their "footprints".

• If you use the focus, the Binding of Ipos, the tome will float in front of the character and a shadowy hand will grow out of the player. When you cast a spell, it will send out a giant, ghostly hand towards the target, or an evil eye.

• Drawing the warhorn Verdarach summons ghostly soldiers and ghostly swords.

• The greatsword, Exordium, changes shape depending on what ability you are using, ie morphing into a hammer for a melee AoE or widening into a shield when blocking.

• The staff Nevemore will summon a flock of crows to circle high above you when drawn.

• The greatswords Twilight and Sunrise (Sunrise is pictured below) have a beautiful, painterly animation, looking as if you are wielding a living painting as a sword. You can see another world inside the sword. If you look into the blade of Twilight, you see starry galaxies. If you look into the blade of Sunrise, you see a blue and golden sky with fluffy clouds. Swinging either sword leaves trails of paint.

FFXIV has nothing like that. They're just sparkly weapons. No special sound effects, no drawing or ability animations, no nothing.

And before it's brought up, yes mounts in GW2 are way better than in any other MMO. Racing around in the beetle chariot is cool, and the momentum based flying is fun.


If FFXIV didn't exist, then I might still be playing GW2. But FFXIV does exist, and to me those positives for GW2 aren't enough to outweigh GW2's negatives and the positives FFXIV has.

[Lane]

I loved GW2 when it launched. At the time, it was damn near close to the type of MMO I would've designed. Then they started gradually going back on their manifesto. It's since become one of the few MMOs I've played that I haven't had a desire to return to since I quit. I didn't like the Living Story let alone in lieu of expansions, so I felt like I did everything I wanted to do in the game. I'd already moved on to something else before HoT was announced. I've heard PoF is good but, again, just haven't seen anything that's made me feel like I want to go back.

Also, yeah, inventory was an issue even at release. They want you to pay for more space. I can't imagine what it's like now.

[Cwimge]

It's ironic you mention GW2, which is arguably the best MMO currently on the market and has no sub. The main reason it struggles has nothing to do with a lack of endgame content, but a lack of player imagination and understanding of it. Most zones have large-scale events that were/are the effective endgame content, not to mention the crafting system for legendary items and high-level gear.

FF is literally getting attention solely because it was the most recent release and Asmongold played it. As far as I know it has nothing GW2 doesn't also have and do better in many cases. Plus it has a sub, which is an enormous negative in my eyes at this point. No game is so good it deserves to suck from my wallet's tit every month.

"Am I so out of touch?"
"No, it's the players who are wrong"

[Lane]

So the biggest excuse that many guys have shared here about ARR, is a bad excuse. ARR story may not be that "interesting", but its not bad or slow to do.

Edit: Not to deter anyone, some people genuinely enjoy ARR and that's fine I just didn't happen to be one of them. I loved HW though.

It isn't bamboo under the fingernails torture, but it's not fun either. It's a lot of porting back and forth with little action. My ranking is as follows:

Start to joining a GC, decent if you start in Ul'dah. I am biased, Ul'dah is best starter city with best Scion.
Sylphs to Coerthas, not fun. Coerthas gets a pass here for reasons.
Post-Coerthas to Snowcloak, not fun.

That is far and away the bulk of ARR, probably 80% of it at least. I did all of ARR twice in the trial and I would not want to do it again even though it is a massive amount of EXP for leveling multiple jobs with the Road to 70 buff. I'd sooner do daily roulettes, fates, and logs. It might be slower, but I'd enjoy it more.

[Wrecktangle]

If we are talking about the perfect videogame my vote goes to Xenogears.

First time we've agreed in a while methinks.

[SpeedDemonHAHA]

NGL This thread kinda triggered me. I made an account just to set somethings straight. Main thing is ability pruning which has been done, IIRC it was done towards then end of Heavensward or Beginning of Stormblood. Trust me it used to be alot worst and I think they did a great job removing redundant and downright useless abilities. As MCH for example I have exactly 20 important abilities and depending on AoE or single target I will only use 14 or 15 of those consistently. Ninja which is my main uses exactly 25 slots and 2 are very situational healing abilities that are pretty much only used for solo play 3 are AoE and 1 utility. I will log on and provide a screenshot if I must to show how downright wrong this is observation was. Imo 15-22 abilities for an MMO is perfect otherwise the game starts to become an over-glorified action-RPG(cough WoW)And on professions I think this is one of the if not the last MMO to actually get crafting right next to Everquest2 so that is very much so subjective to your playstyle.

on a side note to the person(s) above me. yes indeed Xenogears was the greatest game ever made. Long live Fei Fong Wong! Now im gonna go play some FF14 with Xenogears music playing in the background!

[Lane]

I mean, ARR is not bad as saying "Shadowlands". ARR content is still fun to play, for example: Dungeons and Jobs. Leveling up its a fun thing to do, at least for me.

But also, ARR goes that fast, that i dont even care enough for it. Once you have read the story, there is no need to do that again. You can simply skip all the cutscenes and text.

The only thing that makes the MSQ tolerable to enjoyable (IMO) is being interested in or liking the story. One of the big differences between ARR and HW was I read everything and talked to everyone because I was hooked, so the porting back and forth wasn't as noticeable. There was also a lot less filler.

I skipped cutscenes and sped clicked through everything the second time around in ARR along with my SO (who doesn't care about the story) and our experience could be described as a lot of groans, grumbles, and sighs. Port several times across the continent, queue up for something, rinse and repeat. It still took us quite a bit of time to get through it because when we sit down to game we don't want to play port clicker for hours.

I'm going to throw in here too that I hate the way FFXIV does job trainers. You start out in a major city with (usually) a teleport directly to them only at level 30 to be sent to NPCs out in the wilderness (or otherwise in a city/area that makes no sense) and, if you level multiple jobs, good luck remembering where they all are. I have to look it up almost every time (except for DRG). Ability acquisition throughout ARR is still abysmal, made worse by low level content syncing. You get excited to finally learn another active ability only for it to be greyed out the next duty or dungeon you enter.

I think if the MSQ is going to be the primary means of progression they should add more combat to it. You mentioned Shadowlands, which I didn't like most of, but I was at least playing my character between story beats.