I had set Ishgard as my free teleport point all the way till Endwalker. A lot of teleports were cheaper if I ported to Ishgard and then to the destination. Having Firmament right there too was an added bonus.
Final Fantasy XIV (Guide in first post)
- Thread starter Guzrog
- Start date
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You don't have to teleport around betweeen regions but throughout hw you will still do the alpino shuffle non-stop:
you, off in far away lands, venture to the top of the mountain and discover X
alpino: "can you believe we discovered X? lets head back to revenant's toll and talk about it"
4 hours of walking/teleporting later
you: "ok we're here, what's up?"
alpino: "You should totally go explore X, head back there"
you: "are you fucking shitting me right now?"
The quests are much more streamlined in stormblood you rarely have to do as much useless traveling, but it still pops up from time to time. think it was a limitation with their quest engine at the time because there's no fucking reason for it
Ehrgeix
Trakanon Raider
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One of the best moments I had in FF14 was getting to Ishgard for the first time and rushing to do the DRK unlock quest (I was tanking at the time, had started on WAR) -- and listening to the Ishgard theme for the first time then sort of slow walking -> slaughtering a bunch of corrupt knights in my first trip through the lower city. Really fantastic memory / music.
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Goonsquad Officer
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about to finish stormblood, well on the last quest, royal menagerie part. Other than the ninja turtles and naboo/pineapple under the sea early on i'm not just sure why stormblood gets hate compared to heavensward. maybe the final cut scene ruins it? idk, i'll tell you after i finish it. Heavensward did a better job of focusing on the atmosphere of Ishgard but otherwise the storyline of stormblood, The writing/flow is slightly better/more coherent than hw. It seems every one of these follow a similar path:
start: slow/schizophrenic/wishy washy with no real thread connecting the story together and stuck with emotionless/personalityless scion NPCs.
middle: spend about 2 minutes develop 1-2 new npcs giving them some sort of personality/background/storyline, then immediately kill them off (rip scottish samurai)
end: capstone/final battle/wrap up storyline
post content: complete garbage undermining any good will earned from previous ending. eventually by the x.3 to x.5 patches actually breadcrumb the next storyline.
repeat
As far as story goes i'd rank them so far:
ARR
Start: 1/10
middle: 2/10
End: 2/10
Post: -5/10
Overall: 0/10
heavensward:
Start: 2/10
Middle: 3/10
End: 3/10
Post: 1/10
Overall: 3/10
Stormblood:
Start: 1/10
middle: 4/10
End: 4/10
Post: ?
Overall: ?
start: slow/schizophrenic/wishy washy with no real thread connecting the story together and stuck with emotionless/personalityless scion NPCs.
middle: spend about 2 minutes develop 1-2 new npcs giving them some sort of personality/background/storyline, then immediately kill them off (rip scottish samurai)
end: capstone/final battle/wrap up storyline
post content: complete garbage undermining any good will earned from previous ending. eventually by the x.3 to x.5 patches actually breadcrumb the next storyline.
repeat
As far as story goes i'd rank them so far:
ARR
Start: 1/10
middle: 2/10
End: 2/10
Post: -5/10
Overall: 0/10
heavensward:
Start: 2/10
Middle: 3/10
End: 3/10
Post: 1/10
Overall: 3/10
Stormblood:
Start: 1/10
middle: 4/10
End: 4/10
Post: ?
Overall: ?
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Grizzlebeard
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Your skill in maths is significantly overshadowed by your ability to compose rambling walls of text.
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I understand folks disliking ARR generally, especially pacing, doubly so for the post-ARR content. The final 45 min. cutscene does a lot of heavy lifting on its own.
Rating Heavensward writing/story at 3/10 should be a new DSM indicator of severe brain damage though.
Rating Heavensward writing/story at 3/10 should be a new DSM indicator of severe brain damage though.
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Merrith
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Generally this is the opposite of most opinions on this topic (talking 4.0 versus 3.0, post SB patch content is generally well liked), curious why you think this? Please explain
Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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The game downscales you to the level of dungeons/raids when you queue up through the regular duty finder, so high level players can help fill groups for lower level content. Plus they plan to make some of the older stuff runnable with a NPC group, so worst case scenario no one was queuing up, you could run the content with bots.
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In mmo space i don't think i'd call any story a 10/10. They're video games so will always draw comparison to similar media. They are at their heart rpgs thus they compete against single player rpgs, but with far more restraints (such as the necessity for multiplayer content, repeatable content, every other player is also "the hero", etc) which generally hampers the story. RPGs I'd rank 8/10 to 10/10 games would be stuff like Mass Effect 2, Witcher 3, Morrowind, KOTOR, etc. Also some older favorites like Planescape: Torment but it's been decades and idk if that's just member berries or my (at the time) teenage brain thinking that "killing your own mortality" was the greatest shit since sliced bread or what.
As far as MMO's go I'd give SW:TOR's class stories (1-50 base game) between 2/10 and 7/10, maybe even 8/10 for sith warrior or agent but that's a stretch honestly. The expansions vary from 3-4/10 for Hutt cartel to like 5-6 for TET. The new expansions sit in the 4-5/10 range. Other games that fall in to that 4/10 to 7/10 category are things like ESO, Secret World, etc. Most MMOs, especially older MMOs are just settings/worlds, they don't have a story. Claiming that FF14's story is better than games that don't have a story is ridiculous. Grat's I guess here's your participation trophy.
You have to remember there is more to a good story than simply action beats, and in a game like FF14 that's all it has, anime style action beats. Beat the big bad. beat the bigger bad, beat the biggest bad, etc. action beats is just 1 part of a good story, the connective tissue like writing, dialogue, plot, character development/arc, pacing, atmosphere, tension, stakes are all just as, or really, even more important, to string together the action beats and turn it in to more than just some cheesy hollywood style set pieces with zero emotional investment from the audience.
You may overlook weak writing or plot because you happen to be a fan of that particular genre but that really should not matter when you are objectively measuring the story's quality. I'm not a fan of stephen king, occult, conspiracy theories, etc, certainly not in a modern setting, but that doesn't detract from how good I'd rank the secret world. 10 minutes into that game you are hooked because they absolutely nailed the atmosphere, tension, writing, and other worldliness of their setting which greatly contributes to the quality of its story. it drops off by the time you get to Egypt unless you just happen to be a huge fan of Brendan Fraser's Mummy or something, but it picks back up by the time you explore Tokyo.
The beginning of heavensward is better than the beginning of SB, because hw's narrows its focus on a single city (ishgard) and explores the people there and their background. the atmosphere of Ishgard is superior. But once you get past the introductory questline and get to the plot HW is more like ARR in that it's kind of all over the place pulling on multiple unrelated threads (finding your friends, dealing with insurgents, the dragonsong war, the church, Allagan, etc) and it just kind of haphazardly pieces them together. What's the actual plot of HW? One of the nations of the Eorzean alliance noped out and hasn't participated in a while, go find out why. Oh, there's dragons. You didn't know there were dragons here? That they've been under siege for one thousand years? Nope they never mentioned that once back when we were allies and only recently withdrew back to within their borders within the last decade or 2. Ok well we overthrew their state church so they're back in the alliance now.
it develops a handful of NPCs then immediately kills them or otherwise takes them out of play (estinien), and leaves you with the 1 dimensional scions, some of whom you've rescued/reunited with, like they had the opportunity to reintroduce them as real npc's with depth but decided against it. Thinking back on this ARR did something similiar, by crippling Raubahn, the only character they bothered to give a personality/backstory to.
The plot of SB is just a tighter story, has a clear and focused purpose. You are fighting the empire trying to liberate its conquered provinces. You start off like every other story in this game just walking in and thinking since you are the hero and the good guy you will be handed everything with no challenges or even consequences whatsoever because that's all this game's story has done so far. And you lose. You lose big time, you get your shit pushed in. you have to fall back and reassess your so called "strategy" and how to deal with an enemy that actually challenges you, after killing gods and wiping out armies for 40+ levels there's finally some actual tension. not real tension of course (the game itself isn't hard), but the illusion of it, hurdles to overcome, an actual story arc.
People who compare this game to a TV show that starts off bad but after 3 or 4 seasons it get's good are kind of missing the point. A shitty show with 1 good season is not a good show, it's a shitty show with 1 good season. Let me start from season 5 if that's when it gets good. Oh but you won't understand what's going on or know any of the characters, you gotta start from season 1. Well i've started this game from season 1 and let me tell you, I still don't know any of these fucking characters because they are all 1 dimensional robots with no soul. Anyone you'd be interested in has already died. They had a golden opportunity to simply kill off everyone from season 1 (ARR) save for yourself, the protagonist, and could of started over. have Heavensward be about rebuilding the scions from scratch and going to ishgard for help. Going to ishgard, doma, ala mhigo looking for exceptional, fully fleshed out NPCs to rebuild your order could of been the thread tying all these expansions together and it would of been a lot cleaner than what they've done so far.
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Ehrgeix
Trakanon Raider
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I think you kind of exaggerate the badness of the story (but it is pretty bad and obviously e.g., ToR imperial agent story is way better / actually well written).
Interested to see what you think of SHB though - for me 6.0 towered above the rest of the dross and made EW really disappointing rather than just expected mediocrity.
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I will finally hit 8 books and get BiS this week - I think this has been my latest tier to get it ever / disastrous rng. Going to be pfing a bunch after if anyone is on Primal and wants to play, though.
Also - anyone have any sales pitches for a 2nd job to gear? I’m thinking ast if nothing better comes up, really enjoyed leveling it and haven’t healed since sigmascape.
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PS:T was actually amazing - Disco Elysium is an interesting modern take but not really up there. The whole “what can change the nature of a man?” question really worked.
Interested to see what you think of SHB though - for me 6.0 towered above the rest of the dross and made EW really disappointing rather than just expected mediocrity.
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I will finally hit 8 books and get BiS this week - I think this has been my latest tier to get it ever / disastrous rng. Going to be pfing a bunch after if anyone is on Primal and wants to play, though.
Also - anyone have any sales pitches for a 2nd job to gear? I’m thinking ast if nothing better comes up, really enjoyed leveling it and haven’t healed since sigmascape.
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PS:T was actually amazing - Disco Elysium is an interesting modern take but not really up there. The whole “what can change the nature of a man?” question really worked.
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Goonsquad Officer
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They asked Yoshida p once about a classic server. He said it sounded like a nightmare
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welp I have finished post Stormblood and started Shadowbringers. I was about to post a scathing review halfway through when Zenos made his miraculous reappearance, this being what the 8th, 9th time someone you killed/watched die magically isn't dead, but i'm glad I reserved judgement. The plot certainly stretches credulity to the point of being an outright farce, well into the comic book realm of no one staying dead and everything is a joke, but at least they had the decency to retcon an explanation this time. I'm also glad they finally had estinien destroy the nidhogg eyes after your entire team so willy nilly left them laying there on the ground. That was dumber than tossing them off the bridge in HW.
I'm sure at some point they will explain how the real Zeno's possessed the elf body when his corpse was possessed by the asian with a C, but since they don't have the goddamn decency to just name him instead of calling him katana wielding elf, From now on i'm calling him Boros, the "denominator" of the universe. Which makes you the protagonist Saitama, which is fitting because he is a bumbling idiot who can't possibly lose, the same as your character. if the story wants to overuse comic book/anime tropes then it's only fitting it gets compared to the greatest anime parody of all time.
speaking of retcons i'm noticing more and more minor retcons taking place trying to retroactively tie events together and piecemeal a greater empire storyline. it's clear that there was no overall outline or roadmap written for this game, much like most other MMOs, they just pick up the unexplored/unexplained pieces and retcon what they need to make it tie together.
Overall (silliness aside) i'd say the writing is markedly improving over previous entries and SB has a tighter story than what we've seen so far, i'd give the post stormblood content a 4/10, bringing the overall expansion to an average 3.5/10 which edges out HW.
Everyone says shadowbringers is the best expansion, lets hope they figured out how to start an expansion without fumbling around for 10 hours doing dumbshit til they get their rhythm like they have with every version of the game so far.
mental note: Can you imagine how much better this story would of been if they had just left all the scions dead in the post ARR and your team was only you, Raubahn, Aymeric, Estinien, Hien, Yugiri, etc?
I'm sure at some point they will explain how the real Zeno's possessed the elf body when his corpse was possessed by the asian with a C, but since they don't have the goddamn decency to just name him instead of calling him katana wielding elf, From now on i'm calling him Boros, the "denominator" of the universe. Which makes you the protagonist Saitama, which is fitting because he is a bumbling idiot who can't possibly lose, the same as your character. if the story wants to overuse comic book/anime tropes then it's only fitting it gets compared to the greatest anime parody of all time.
speaking of retcons i'm noticing more and more minor retcons taking place trying to retroactively tie events together and piecemeal a greater empire storyline. it's clear that there was no overall outline or roadmap written for this game, much like most other MMOs, they just pick up the unexplored/unexplained pieces and retcon what they need to make it tie together.
Overall (silliness aside) i'd say the writing is markedly improving over previous entries and SB has a tighter story than what we've seen so far, i'd give the post stormblood content a 4/10, bringing the overall expansion to an average 3.5/10 which edges out HW.
Everyone says shadowbringers is the best expansion, lets hope they figured out how to start an expansion without fumbling around for 10 hours doing dumbshit til they get their rhythm like they have with every version of the game so far.
mental note: Can you imagine how much better this story would of been if they had just left all the scions dead in the post ARR and your team was only you, Raubahn, Aymeric, Estinien, Hien, Yugiri, etc?
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