Final Fantasy XIV

[Nooneatall]

2/3 have homosexual content, the other is a weeb game.

All three of them are woke. In fact, FF14 is perhaps the most woke of them all. It isn't overtly obvious at a glance.

In WoW, you had the blackwashing of Dalaran and Stormwind human NPCs (in a world where all seven kingdoms are white, and brown/bronzed/black people exist but are a minority diaspora). Annoying but you don't interact with Dalaran or Stormwind vendors all that often so it can be overlooked. New faction leaders tend to be females (most allied race leaders, 3 of the Covenant leaders, etc), you have ridiculous stuff like a ****** becoming the head of the afterlife (don't you want people who do not have a grip on reality to judge the fate of all souls?) or two gay centaurs gaining the blessing of their ancestors (literally encouraging their bloodline to cease), Chromie is now ***** for some reason, etc. But again they get very little screentime compared to the manly OGs like Thrall, Genn, Magni, etc. In the current expansion, Dragonflight, most zone questlines are about stronk female leaders lecturing to passive, insecure men. It comes off more as a joke than something to be really sad about. Annoying, but story just isn't as big part of the WoW experience. You do the 20 hour long expansion story once and then spend 500 more hours doing mythic+ dungeons.

In GW2, the wokeness is easily forgettable. I think there is a blink and you miss it line in season 2 where you find out that Caithe and Faolain were lesbian lovers, and then Faolain disappears and you forget about it. There is another lesbian couple that pops up every now and then, but again mostly forgettable. Nothing obnoxious until late into season 5/Icebrood Saga when one of the strong male leaders gets replaced by a woman who advocates for peace and globalism, which is then followed up by more of the same in the End of Dragons expansion. But GW2 is more gameplay focused so it's easier to forget.

FF14 is the most egregious, as it is a story first game, a 400+ hour long visual novel. The globalist agenda doesn't become recognizable until about 300 hours in, around late Stormblood/early Shadowbringers. Every racial capital is being forced into becoming a multicultural city. Every kingdom you visit is overthrown and replaced by a republic. Every country has to join fantasy NATO and hold hands and join sing kumbaya, or they are evil. Countries have no right to fight for their own selfinterests or their own people, unless it is fantasy NATO/the protagonists. And then there is the heavy death cult messaging in Shadowbringers and Endwalker. It's a 400+ hour long story where this stuff is front and center, and you are exposed to it for a lot longer than in WoW or GW2. You can laugh at the blackwashed NPCs or the gay centaurs in WoW and move on, but you can't really do that in FF14.

It's a visual novel and not really a game. I've played up to end walker and probably missed a lot of nonsense by just skipping ****.
The worst part of all it is it's not good at being a novel

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It's a visual novel and not really a game. I've played up to end walker and probably missed a lot of nonsense by just skipping ****.
The worst part of all it is it's not good at being a novel

I think it's good if you want to go on a high fantasy adventure with likeable characters. I have never found WRPG casts to be anywhere near as likeable as JRPG or VN casts. The examinations of characters' internal feelings and thoughts is also welcome helps better realize everyone, including the villains. I think the biggest failing execution wise is the lack of tension. The base game ends with a lot of characters dead and the player character being framed for regicide, but then the following expansion never delivers on any of that and instead just retcons the deaths and handwaves away your criminal status. A few side characters die up through Stormblood, but no one front and center, and then people stop dying altogether after Stormblood. The Endwalker expansion is about a world wide apocalypse and despair, but it never feels credible because you know no cities will be wiped off of the face of the earth and no one you care about will die. So in that regard, some VNs I have played like Aselia or Muv-Luv are better at maintaining tension and keeping you in the edge of your seat.

The only complaint I have is that - starting with the Shadowbringers patches - there is a bit too much soliloquizing. It was nice at first, but then by the late patches and the Endwalker expansion, the plot is constantly being ground to a halt so characters can pontificate about the meaning of life and having hope and all that, and it gets very repetitive, and it doesn't feel earned when most of the protagonists have never really had to suffer anything.

[Nooneatall]

It's a visual novel and not really a game. I've played up to end walker and probably missed a lot of nonsense by just skipping ****.
The worst part of all it is it's not good at being a novel

I think it's good if you want to go on a high fantasy adventure with likeable characters. I have never found WRPG casts to be anywhere near as likeable as JRPG or VN casts. The examinations of characters' internal feelings and thoughts is also welcome helps better realize everyone, including the villains. I think the biggest failing execution wise is the lack of tension. The base game ends with a lot of characters dead and the player character being framed for regicide, but then the following expansion never delivers on any of that and instead just retcons the deaths and handwaves away your criminal status. A few side characters die up through Stormblood, but no one front and center, and then people stop dying altogether after Stormblood. The Endwalker expansion is about a world wide apocalypse and despair, but it never feels credible because you know no cities will be wiped off of the face of the earth and no one you care about will die. So in that regard, some VNs I have played like Aselia or Muv-Luv are better at maintaining tension and keeping you in the edge of your seat.

The only complaint I have is that - starting with the Shadowbringers patches - there is a bit too much soliloquizing. It was nice at first, but then by the late patches and the Endwalker expansion, the plot is constantly being ground to a halt so characters can pontificate about the meaning of life and having hope and all that, and it gets very repetitive, and it doesn't feel earned when most of the protagonists have never really had to suffer anything.

Well I'm not the biggest jrpg fan outside final fantasy and I hate visual novels. The characters all just seem like anime tropes to me. You're right that the game starts feeling like final fantasy and being fun when you get to team up with those party members in raids instead of other players.

[WhiteShark]

And then there is the heavy death cult messaging in Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

Would you elaborate on this?

[LemonDemonGirl]

I'm sorry but the 100 hour cutscenes put me to sleep. Plus, you LITERALLY HAVE TO PAY to change your appearance. In WoW you can do it with ingame currency in 3 seconds

[Finarfin]

I'm sorry but the 100 hour cutscenes put me to sleep. Plus, you LITERALLY HAVE TO PAY to change your appearance. In WoW you can do it with ingame currency in 3 seconds

You mean complete change of appearance? If you want to change race, sex and looks. it does cost fantasia (potion bought with rl money) but hairstyles, and stuff is paid with ingame gil. Warcraft used to take money for the barber but they changed that so that you can change everything, even sex for free.

[Zothique]

Proud to say I've never played a Final Fantasy game once in my life.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

And then there is the heavy death cult messaging in Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

Would you elaborate on this?

I might have misspoke. I am not quite referring to the death cult in the way like how Brian Niemeier refers to it online contemporarily.

I will have to get a little into the weeds here for this to make sense.

► Show Spoiler

In Shadowbringers and Endwalker, it is revealed that mankind as it exists in the present is in a fallen, objectively inferior state to what it originally was. The ancients were immortal, held authority over creatures, and there was no death or war. Also, everyone was a powerful wizard.





Somehow, despite this paradise, one wizard is moody and decides to end the world, causing The Final Days. Most of the world is destroyed but much of the ancient wizard population sacrifices themselves into aether to fuel a summon, Zodiark, which stops The Final Days. The survivors then begin working on a plan to get their people back out of the summon, which seems plausible given how there is all this gnostic soul stealing and body hijacking going on in the game, and aether seems to be able to converted into anything, and your body being physically destroyed isn't the end of the world since a new one can be created for a soul to inhabit, and we know the ancient souls survived inside Zodiark. So it's like FF10 where Yu Yevon sacrifices the populace of Zanarkand to create Sin and win the war and Bevelle, but here it is reversible.

To get the ancients back, the survivors decide to sacrifice the new lifeforms that have begun appearing in the post-cataclysm world. I don't think we ever got any confirmation on what exactly these were. Venat simps presume that they were sentients, but we don't see or hear about any non-human sentients when travel back to their era in Endwalker. So it sounds like they were just random animals. The ancients can't just liquidate Zodiark into aether and turn him back into all of the sacrificed people because Zodiark is still needed to prevent the The Final Days from happening again. So additional aether is required.





Enter Venat, who the narrative pretends is a hero, but if you stop to think about the plot for more than 10 seconds, you realize that she is a crazy megalomaniacal rebel and the biggest mass murderer in history and is responsible for almost all of the tragedy that happened in the game. She decides that sacrificing these lesser lifeforms to resurrect their dead is wrong, and that they have to "accept their loss and move on" (paraphrasing, but it's a common spiel by the so-called heroes throughout ShB and Endwalker). What? To prevent the sacrifice of these other lifeforms, she has her 12 syncophants sacrifice themselves to create their own summon, Hydaelyn, which she then hops into and uses to attack Zodiark. Ofcourse, Zodiark is powered by the entire ancient populace, so to win Hydaelyn/Venat casts a spell that subdivides the world and everything in it (except herself) into 14, effectively killing literally everyone and everything except four people. This is the Sundering.





In the post Sundering world, every man is 1/14th of what he once was. Body. Mind. Soul. Magical talent. Everything. They have also lost their immortality, their authority over creatures, their wizard powers, and so on. And people are now divided. So now people are getting eaten by monsters, and people now die of illness and old age, and there is now war between people and death and suffering, and so on. Man is now in a fallen state. And then if you take the Nier mobile game crossover event as canon, then people in the immediate post-Sundering world didn't even have bodies and couldn't even speak. Everyone was just some goo.

Fortunately, three ancients, Elidibius (the speaker of the ancients' ruling body), Emet-Selch (most powerful wizard who ever, ever lived), and Lahabrea (wizard engineer who drew up the blueprints for Zodiark, also runs a prison), managed to evade the Sundering (I don't think it was ever explained how. During ShB it was theorized that they might have been on the moon when the world was sundered, but then Endwalker reveals that the moon was also sundered into 14 lesser copies too). These three Unsundered are ofcourse horrified at what has happened, and embark on the long an arduous task of restoring the world. Which means merging all 14 pieces of everyone and the world back together into one. And then, ofcourse, get their people back out of Zodiark (which has now been divided and imprisoned into 14 copies across 14 moons).





Whenever a shard world is merged/rejoined back into the main one, everything in it (people, animals, forests, civilizations, continents, etc) is liquidated into aether which is then added to its Source shard counterpart. So technically these subdivided people are being murdered, but your subdivided soul gets merged with your main soul. You, the player character, merge with one of your subdivided counterparts, Ardbert, so you are now both the same people and you could act as Ardbert in one scene.





Anyway, the Unsundered are the overarching antagonists you fight throughout the game as they try to restore you. Venat/Hydaelyn rewrites history and begins presenting herself as a benevolent goddess (when she is actually a rebel wizard) and gets people to worship her as a god. The storyline ends with you killing all of the Unsundered and preventing mankind from returning to its pre-fall state of no war, no death, paradise, etc. The narrative unironically passes this off as a good thing.

TL;DR is that the world view became quite twisted in ShB and EW. On the surface, characters are espousing empty words about "have hope" and "move forward", but in the end there is no actual hope. Your actions prevent the restoration of mankind, condemning humanity to forever languish in poor health and conflict and death. All the gods are fake and you shouldn't pray to anything ever. There is no afterlife (you reincarnate over and over until your planet's lifestream dies) and all of the worlds will die eventually so there is no eternal hope. The heroes constantly tell villains "you have to accept your loss and move on from the past!", and then the heroes will bend over backwards to save their preferred people. G'raha went back in time to prevent the 8th calamity. As far as he knew, everyone born after the 8th Calamity would have been erased had he succeeded. The Void arc began when the Scions and Vytra jumped into the Void and began slaughtering Voidsent willy nilly. From our perspective they were not truly alive and did not deserve any consideration. Just like the Sundered to the Unsundered! Hien floods his country's capital city, killing many innocents like painters or servants or chefs and so forth (not just Garlean soldiers), but he's treated as a hero, but when Fordola orders an artillery barrage on a tower that has become occupied by the enemy she is labelled as evil. And so on. So it seems that yes, killing the wrong people is in fact a good thing, with who the "wrong people" are depends upon your feelings.

Sorry for the long post. I tried condensing it down. There are other aspects that bugged me that I am probably forgetting right now. It does remind me a lot of how Trails' narrative soured me the further I went in, particularly with Ao no Kiseki's/Trails to Azure's ending which was very similar in how the protagonists rejected an opportunity to objectively improve the world state and tell people who want a better world to shut up and "you have to move forward!", but then hypocritically bend over backwards to change things when it suits them. It's morally bankrupt.

[WhiteShark]

Sorry for the long post. I tried condensing it down.

It was as deeply informative as I could have hoped. Thanks.

TL;DR is that the world view became quite twisted in ShB and EW. On the surface, characters are espousing empty words about "have hope" and "move forward", but in the end there is no actual hope. Your actions prevent the restoration of mankind, condemning humanity to forever languish in poor health and conflict and death. All the gods are fake and you shouldn't pray to anything ever. There is no afterlife (you reincarnate over and over until your planet's lifestream dies) and all of the worlds will die eventually so there is no eternal hope.

I have a suspicion that what happens in cases like this is that the writer is, from a perhaps noble impulse, trying to ground the fictional morals in reality, but the reality he believes in is nihilistic, so all he can offer is platitudes while pretending the void is good. Paradise must be destroyed because he can't accept it, nevermind that in the fiction it really existed and can yet be attained again.

The heroes constantly tell villains "you have to accept your loss and move on from the past!", and then the heroes will bend over backwards to save their preferred people.

This reflects a (depressingly common) lack of basic moral logic. I can only imagine that the writers of such really haven't put any thought into anything but the drama, perhaps because they lack any moral framework within themselves. It's one thing to be consistently existentialist, but to try and have it both ways is just absurd.

[A Chinese opium den]

And then there is the heavy death cult messaging in Shadowbringers and Endwalker.

Would you elaborate on this?

I might have misspoke. I am not quite referring to the death cult in the way like how Brian Niemeier refers to it online contemporarily.

I will have to get a little into the weeds here for this to make sense.

► Show Spoiler

In Shadowbringers and Endwalker, it is revealed that mankind as it exists in the present is in a fallen, objectively inferior state to what it originally was. The ancients were immortal, held authority over creatures, and there was no death or war. Also, everyone was a powerful wizard.





Somehow, despite this paradise, one wizard is moody and decides to end the world, causing The Final Days. Most of the world is destroyed but much of the ancient wizard population sacrifices themselves into aether to fuel a summon, Zodiark, which stops The Final Days. The survivors then begin working on a plan to get their people back out of the summon, which seems plausible given how there is all this gnostic soul stealing and body hijacking going on in the game, and aether seems to be able to converted into anything, and your body being physically destroyed isn't the end of the world since a new one can be created for a soul to inhabit, and we know the ancient souls survived inside Zodiark. So it's like FF10 where Yu Yevon sacrifices the populace of Zanarkand to create Sin and win the war and Bevelle, but here it is reversible.

To get the ancients back, the survivors decide to sacrifice the new lifeforms that have begun appearing in the post-cataclysm world. I don't think we ever got any confirmation on what exactly these were. Venat simps presume that they were sentients, but we don't see or hear about any non-human sentients when travel back to their era in Endwalker. So it sounds like they were just random animals. The ancients can't just liquidate Zodiark into aether and turn him back into all of the sacrificed people because Zodiark is still needed to prevent the The Final Days from happening again. So additional aether is required.





Enter Venat, who the narrative pretends is a hero, but if you stop to think about the plot for more than 10 seconds, you realize that she is a crazy megalomaniacal rebel and the biggest mass murderer in history and is responsible for almost all of the tragedy that happened in the game. She decides that sacrificing these lesser lifeforms to resurrect their dead is wrong, and that they have to "accept their loss and move on" (paraphrasing, but it's a common spiel by the so-called heroes throughout ShB and Endwalker). What? To prevent the sacrifice of these other lifeforms, she has her 12 syncophants sacrifice themselves to create their own summon, Hydaelyn, which she then hops into and uses to attack Zodiark. Ofcourse, Zodiark is powered by the entire ancient populace, so to win Hydaelyn/Venat casts a spell that subdivides the world and everything in it (except herself) into 14, effectively killing literally everyone and everything except four people. This is the Sundering.





In the post Sundering world, every man is 1/14th of what he once was. Body. Mind. Soul. Magical talent. Everything. They have also lost their immortality, their authority over creatures, their wizard powers, and so on. And people are now divided. So now people are getting eaten by monsters, and people now die of illness and old age, and there is now war between people and death and suffering, and so on. Man is now in a fallen state. And then if you take the Nier mobile game crossover event as canon, then people in the immediate post-Sundering world didn't even have bodies and couldn't even speak. Everyone was just some goo.

Fortunately, three ancients, Elidibius (the speaker of the ancients' ruling body), Emet-Selch (most powerful wizard who ever, ever lived), and Lahabrea (wizard engineer who drew up the blueprints for Zodiark, also runs a prison), managed to evade the Sundering (I don't think it was ever explained how. During ShB it was theorized that they might have been on the moon when the world was sundered, but then Endwalker reveals that the moon was also sundered into 14 lesser copies too). These three Unsundered are ofcourse horrified at what has happened, and embark on the long an arduous task of restoring the world. Which means merging all 14 pieces of everyone and the world back together into one. And then, ofcourse, get their people back out of Zodiark (which has now been divided and imprisoned into 14 copies across 14 moons).





Whenever a shard world is merged/rejoined back into the main one, everything in it (people, animals, forests, civilizations, continents, etc) is liquidated into aether which is then added to its Source shard counterpart. So technically these subdivided people are being murdered, but your subdivided soul gets merged with your main soul. You, the player character, merge with one of your subdivided counterparts, Ardbert, so you are now both the same people and you could act as Ardbert in one scene.





Anyway, the Unsundered are the overarching antagonists you fight throughout the game as they try to restore you. Venat/Hydaelyn rewrites history and begins presenting herself as a benevolent goddess (when she is actually a rebel wizard) and gets people to worship her as a god. The storyline ends with you killing all of the Unsundered and preventing mankind from returning to its pre-fall state of no war, no death, paradise, etc. The narrative unironically passes this off as a good thing.

TL;DR is that the world view became quite twisted in ShB and EW. On the surface, characters are espousing empty words about "have hope" and "move forward", but in the end there is no actual hope. Your actions prevent the restoration of mankind, condemning humanity to forever languish in poor health and conflict and death. All the gods are fake and you shouldn't pray to anything ever. There is no afterlife (you reincarnate over and over until your planet's lifestream dies) and all of the worlds will die eventually so there is no eternal hope. The heroes constantly tell villains "you have to accept your loss and move on from the past!", and then the heroes will bend over backwards to save their preferred people. G'raha went back in time to prevent the 8th calamity. As far as he knew, everyone born after the 8th Calamity would have been erased had he succeeded. The Void arc began when the Scions and Vytra jumped into the Void and began slaughtering Voidsent willy nilly. From our perspective they were not truly alive and did not deserve any consideration. Just like the Sundered to the Unsundered! Hien floods his country's capital city, killing many innocents like painters or servants or chefs and so forth (not just Garlean soldiers), but he's treated as a hero, but when Fordola orders an artillery barrage on a tower that has become occupied by the enemy she is labelled as evil. And so on. So it seems that yes, killing the wrong people is in fact a good thing, with who the "wrong people" are depends upon your feelings.

Sorry for the long post. I tried condensing it down. There are other aspects that bugged me that I am probably forgetting right now. It does remind me a lot of how Trails' narrative soured me the further I went in, particularly with Ao no Kiseki's/Trails to Azure's ending which was very similar in how the protagonists rejected an opportunity to objectively improve the world state and tell people who want a better world to shut up and "you have to move forward!", but then hypocritically bend over backwards to change things when it suits them. It's morally bankrupt.

I feel vindicated for not paying attention to the story at all, it actually was stupid all along.

[WhiteShark]

I am suddenly reminded of Perelandra.

At last it dawned upon him what all these stories were about. Each one of these women had stood forth alone and braved a terrible risk for her child, her lover, or her people. Each had been misunderstood, reviled and persecuted: but each also magnificently vindicated by the event. The precise details were often not very easy to follow. Ransom had more than a suspicion that many of these noble pioneers had been what in ordinary terrestrial speech we call witches or perverts. But that was all in the background. What emerged from the stories was rather an image than an idea – the picture of the tall, slender form, unbowed though the world’s weight rested upon its shoulders, stepping forth fearless and friendless into the dark to do for others what those others forbade it to do yet needed to have done. And all the time, as a sort of background to these goddess shapes, the speaker was building up a picture of the other sex. No word was directly spoken on the subject: but one felt them there as a huge, dim multitude of creatures pitifully childish and complacently arrogant; timid, meticulous, unoriginating; sluggish and ox-like, rooted to the earth almost in their indolence, prepared to try nothing, to risk nothing, to make no exertion, and capable of being raised into full life only by the unthanked and rebellious virtue of their females.

‘He has hidden the half of what happened,’ said Weston’s corpse-like mouth. ‘Hardness came out of it but also splendour. They made with their own hands mountains higher than your Fixed Island. They made for themselves Floating Islands greater than yours which they could move at will through the ocean faster than any bird can fly. Because there was not always food enough, a woman could give the only fruit to her child or her husband and eat death instead – could give them all, as you in your little narrow life of playing and kissing and riding fishes have never done, nor shall do till you break the commandment. Because knowledge was harder to find, those few who found it became beautiful and excelled their fellows as you excel the beasts; and thousands were striving for their love …’

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The new expansion city, Tuliyollal, is better than the last two. I preferred the aesthetics of the Crystarium with the red brick, elegant metalwork, stained glass, etc, but the spaces were huge and the game didn't populate them with enough NPCs, so you felt like an ant slowly running across these oversized empty courtyards which I do not think was the intended experience. Even in the story cutscenes where you had crowds of NPCs, there were nowhere near enough to fill up the spaces. Sharlayan is boring grey mush. Turalyoli does not look like boring grey mush and does not have the conspicuous design issues that the Crystarium had.

That being said, the city feels more like a vacation spot in Hawaii than the capital of a continent spanning empire. It pales in comparison to the promotional art and Dazar'alor from WoW.




Dazar'Alor from World of Warcraft.


I like the big band jazz music for the new capital city, but it feels weird for a distinctly USA genre to be used for a South American/Pacific island tribal themed location, rather than a more modern urban environment like Garlemald. Maybe I will AFK here this expansion instead of at Kugane or my house.








The story is about sailing to the empire in the New World and participating in its succession tournament. There are four candidates, and you back the lion princess. To win, you have to perform seven feats and then find the lost Golden City, which I suspect will turn out to be that futuristic sci fi city that has been shown off in the pre-release marketing and the patch notes. I don't think we will find a classic El Dorado. The first hour or two was boring fluff conversations, but once you reach the palace and the competition begins, the story becomes much more engaging.




I do have complaints about Wuk Lamat, the claimant I am supposed to be aiding. The game railroaded my character into supporting some random girl I don't know about in a succession competition. Given how benevolent the Warrior of Light is supposed to be, you would think he would first travel to the New World and meet the other claimants first before deciding who to aid? And now that I have spent a few hours with her, I want to switch claimants. She is incompetent. Erenville is the one who has to do everything for her. Plan how to achieve the overarching goal, instruct her how to accomplish the task right in front of her. Stop her from wasting her money buying clothes she doesn't need. Teach her economics 101. Etc. Given how fragile this 80 year old, multiracial empire is, I anticpate Tural would collapse under her. I wish I was aiding Koana, who seems to be good and competent.

Another thing too, is that I am really trying to like Wuk Lamat. She is the main character of the expansion, after all. She looks a lot prettier with her hair now, and she sounds cute in Japanese too. Unfortunately, I am playing with the English dub (because it was an unusually good dub)... and her English voice actor is a man. She has a lot of funny scenes, but whenever I hear her dub voice, it makes her unlikeable and I want to skip dialogue. It really brings down the experience. I am baffled as to why Square Enix thought to do this. The voice actor isn't even British like all of the other FF14 VAs.






I like the second zone. From the zone previews, it looked like yet another boring mundane map and was hoping to skip past it and get to the cooler fantastical zones ASAP, but now that I am running around inside it, it's pretty nice. The map is an incline and is surrounded by rocks and drops into the abyss, so it feels mountainous.

It would be nice if Tural's lore was reflected in gameplay. I am playing the new Viper job, which was created in Tural to specifically counter the Vidraal, a special type of monster native to Tural. However, you do not gain any actual mechanical advantage when facing off against the Tural Vidraal, like how the Onymyoji job in Granblue Fantasy specializes in cancelling the Omen mechanic in certain fights, or how Paladin in WoW is strong against undead and demons. The Pelupelu are a notorious merchant clan in Tural who are insistant at parting people with their money, but that doesn't happen to you in gameplay like with Lyle the salesman in Animal Crossing who chases you until you buy from him.

Erenville said that there was a strong storm that has eroded the treacherous, steep mountain roads and made them slippery, and that you can't use a mount in such rugged terrain. You travel to the third zone on a boat floating down the river, but it happens in a 15 minute scripted dungeon you do once. Contrast that with FF11 which had the adventure element represented in open world gameplay. In that game's New World expansion, you could interact with the environment to make it traversible, such as smashing tree stumps or stalagmite blocking your path, climbing cliffs, etc.


Traversing Ulbulka in FF11


They keep making a big deal about how difficult Tural is to traverse on foot, and how hot balloons are finnicky... but this is a fantasy world with countless large, flying creatures. Surely they would have been tamed and bred as flying mounts? If Hien, the prince of the small and impoverished kingdom of Doma could secure flying mounts for us, and was able to fly his small army half way across the world to show up for the war in Gyr Abania, then surely the princes of this rich, continent spanning empire would have access to them?

I am a little peeved by how unoriginal the night themes for the zones are. It is yet more grand piano arranges. 10 years of FF14 zones, and there is a lot of variety in the day themes, but almost all of the night themes are grand piano arranges. It feels like the music team's cheap go-to. Contrast that with WoW's night themes which are much more varied and isn't >80% piano arranges.




I like the regular battle theme. It isn't ear grating like ShB's theme, nor noisy, simplistic, and repetitive like EW's battle theme.

[Kalarion]

Contrast that with FF11 which had the adventure element represented in open world gameplay. In that game's New World expansion, you could interact with the environment to make it traversible, such as smashing tree stumps or stalagmite blocking your path, climbing cliffs, etc.


Traversing Ulbulka in FF11

Weird, that looks eerily like Jugner.

[Irenaeus]

Proud to say I've never played a Final Fantasy game once in my life.

I played 7 (ok) and 8 (bad) because of the hype in the late 90s. The rest I just looked at the screenshots and they all looked really bad/alien to me. I hear the ones prior to 7 are good in the oldschool way.

[Xenich]

Gaming should have remained a niche hobby. I blame everything bad in the gaming world to it being enjoyed by normies.

Yep. Early on, you ran into weirdoes from time to time, but for the most part the people playing games, and the early MMOs were "normal" professionals and hobbyist. Not only that, but they understood gaming, why you play a game, and did not whine and complain constantly about how things should be easier, faster, simpler, etc... Trying to explain why negative mechanics are important in play is lost on the normies. They think games are all about "fun" and "relaxing while being stoned" and go on about "I don't have time to do that, I work all day!" when something requires long term progression, learning, etc...

Gotta have that "quick fix" instant grat play where every action "something happens" and there is an epic reward for it!

[Vergil]

I will now try your game

[Finarfin]

I will now try your game

You seem to have a type.

[Finarfin]

IF you really try it, enter this code UCCTV8PW before you get 30 days sub. You get some nice stuff like a friendship circlet that increases xp by 20% when you are lvl 25 and below, Aetheryte Ticket x 99 and Ballroom Etiquette - Improper Greetings along with 10 silver chocobo feathers that you can use to get weapons and equipment for lvl 20 and 50
(Yes this IS Shilling, cause I like the game)

[Vergil]

Is there a free trial?

[Oyster Sauce]

Is there a free trial?

The base game before expansions is all free iirc

[Finarfin]

Is there a free trial?

A REALM REBORN, HEAVENSWARD and STORMBLOOD are part of the free trial.

[Vergil]

Is there a free trial?

A REALM REBORN, HEAVENSWARD and STORMBLOOD are part of the free trial.

Okay THANK YOU for the USEFUL INFORMATION about the FREE TRIAL.

[Vergil]

IF you really try it, enter this code UCCTV8PW before you get 30 days sub. You get some nice stuff like a friendship circlet that increases xp by 20% when you are lvl 25 and below, Aetheryte Ticket x 99 and Ballroom Etiquette - Improper Greetings along with 10 silver chocobo feathers that you can use to get weapons and equipment for lvl 20 and 50
(Yes this IS Shilling, cause I like the game)

Do I need to purchase game time to use this code?

[Finarfin]

IF you really try it, enter this code UCCTV8PW before you get 30 days sub. You get some nice stuff like a friendship circlet that increases xp by 20% when you are lvl 25 and below, Aetheryte Ticket x 99 and Ballroom Etiquette - Improper Greetings along with 10 silver chocobo feathers that you can use to get weapons and equipment for lvl 20 and 50
(Yes this IS Shilling, cause I like the game)

Do I need to purchase game time to use this code?

No, you need to buy the game and then use the code but not after you got 30 days of subscription. (it's somewhat convoluted)

[Val the Moofia Boss]

@Vergil some tips:

IIRC free trial players have a lower priority when going through the login queue. A new expansion has just launched so there is a login queue during prime time. You will either need to play outside of prime time, or get in the queue ahead of when you actually want to start playing.

The English dub for the base game's storyline is a mixed bag. You can switch to Japanese voices if you want. Once you reach the Heavensward expansion, they changed their English dub voice recording studio to London and recasted most of the voices, and the overall quality improves a lot.

You can switch jobs any time, but they don't get cool looking abilities until you are late into the expansions. Almost all of the unique class mechanics have been scrubbed out so they're all pretty homogenous now. So the main difference is in how you want to look, ie what job outfits you can wear, and your animations when running around with your weapon. You can use this website to browse what jobs can wear what outfits.

If you wish to level more jobs, then the most efficient way is to queue for your daily levelling dungeon, alliance raid, main scenario instance, and Frontline roulette. You get a double exp bonus when levelling jobs up to your highest levelled job, ie if you have conjurer at 30 and decide you want to switch to lancers, then he gets 2x exp until 30.

Upon beating the base game story, you get a free Phial of Fantasia which allows you to race change your character if you don't like how your look or your run/idle animations. They also just added another quest in Ul'dah that gives you a free fantasia.

There are more hairstyles available than what you see at character creation. You unlock more by buying from vendors.

Most game content and features are unlocked by story progression. You unlock the minigame casino, the Gold Saucer, at level 15. I remember having a lot of fun doing the Chocobo Racing, the jumping puzzles, and some Mahjong. You unlock instanced PvP at level 30, and in there everyone has the same stats and abilities regardless of level so you could be fighting against level capped players if you want. The 5v5 Crystalline Conflict game mode is a little fun. You unlock the first endgame grind zone, Eureka, once you finish the base Stormblood storyline. Eureka is the first place where you can play a lot with other players out in the world, and there is a little bit of class customization in there with DPS jobs being able to tank, or tank jobs being able to become DPS roles, and so on.

4 man dungeons can be done with an NPC party. All other instanced content has to be done with other players, or soloed if you are overlevelled and turn off level sync.

The game by default has a greyish tint. You have to install reshade if you want to make it a little more colorful.

There are also mods/addons (installed by using XIVlauncher and Dalamud) that improve the experience, such as reducing the input delay, consolidating abilities into a single button to reduce button bloat, allowing you to preview outfits you haven't obtained yet, etc. But a new expansion has just launched and people are playing through that first and haven't updated the addons yet.

[Rand]

Final Fantasy XIV gone woke? Steam reviews drop to mixed. Video clip added.

Players are upset with the latest MMO expansion, which shifts the story away from the player to focus on Wuk Lamat, an NPC which they find insufferable and who is voiced by a ***** voice actress.

The story and voice acting is considered so bad that people want to skip every cutscene involving her. Listen for yourself in the attached clip. Personally, I don't care if the VO is *****, but it does sound pretty wooden and stilted and forced here. It is also curious that English/USA is the ONLY place they cast a ***** VO.

Blame is falling everywhere from bad writing, bad (and woke) localization, but especially the voice acting.

Is this another move by the Square Enix "Ethics Department" which mandated Tifa's breast reduction?

[Finarfin]

But why are people mad about Dawntrail being more about Wuk Lamat? She is a contender for the throne and we already told her that we'll help her get on the throne. I can understand that people are mad since she's voiced by a ****** in the en dub (there's another character btw that is voiced by a ******) but saying she's taking the spotlight from us is disingenuous since we already agreed to help and see this as a somewhat "relaxed" way of life after the fuckups of the previous expansions.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Players are upset with the latest MMO expansion, which shifts the story away from the player

I don't mind getting an expansion story not about the player character, though it is hard for me to imagine how they could do another one well. One of the weaknesses of FFXIV's story is that the player character is a mute who rarely advances the plot on his own. The Scions do all of the investigating, the deductions, planning what the heroes will do next, negotiating and confronting other characters, etc. The MC is the Scion's glorified muscle. FF14's MC is incapable of driving the story forward on his own like GW2's voiced MC.

Expansion stories about an NPC can and have worked. Every Final Fantasy XI expansion is about the new cute girl of the week, with only the final storyline being about the player character as the star.

But why are people mad about Dawntrail being more about Wuk Lamat? She is a contender for the throne and we already told her that we'll help her get on the throne. I can understand that people are mad since she's voiced by a ****** in the en dub (there's another character btw that is voiced by a ******) but saying she's taking the spotlight from us is disingenuous since we already agreed to help and see this as a somewhat "relaxed" way of life after the fuckups of the previous expansions.

The main issue with Wuk Lamat is that the story is about choosing Tural's next ruler, and the narrative has failed to make me want to install her as ruler. I am in the Mamooja village, and I still feel she would be bad if installed. She spouts "we must all put away our weapons and be nice to each other!" as if simply asking people to not invade you or to not cheat will work. Again, Koana and Zoora Ja are competent and have the strength to actually hold the country together and fend off invaders, be it through martial skill or industrualization. Wuk Lamat is funny, but I don't find her motives to become Dawnservant to be as compelling as the other three. Even though Bakool Ja Ja would be a bad ruler, I personally find his motivations to be more compelling than Wuk Lamat and would prefer to try to reform him instead of continuing on with Lamatyi.

[Vergil]

Game said every world was full after spending 30mins making my char so I didn't play

[Finarfin]

Players are upset with the latest MMO expansion, which shifts the story away from the player

I don't mind getting an expansion story not about the player character, though it is hard for me to imagine how they could do another one well. One of the weaknesses of FFXIV's story is that the player character is a mute who rarely advances the plot on his own. The Scions do all of the investigating, the deductions, planning what the heroes will do next, negotiating and confronting other characters, etc. The MC is the Scion's glorified muscle. FF14's MC is incapable of driving the story forward on his own like GW2's voiced MC.

Expansion stories about an NPC can and have worked. Every Final Fantasy XI expansion is about the new cute girl of the week, with only the final storyline being about the player character as the star.

But why are people mad about Dawntrail being more about Wuk Lamat? She is a contender for the throne and we already told her that we'll help her get on the throne. I can understand that people are mad since she's voiced by a ****** in the en dub (there's another character btw that is voiced by a ******) but saying she's taking the spotlight from us is disingenuous since we already agreed to help and see this as a somewhat "relaxed" way of life after the fuckups of the previous expansions.

The main issue with Wuk Lamat is that the story is about choosing Tural's next ruler, and the narrative has failed to make me want to install her as ruler. I am in the Mamooja village, and I still feel she would be bad if installed. She spouts "we must all put away our weapons and be nice to each other!" as if simply asking people to not invade you or to not cheat will work. Again, Koana and Zoora Ja are competent and have the strength to actually hold the country together and fend off invaders, be it through martial skill or industrualization. Wuk Lamat is funny, but I don't find her motives to become Dawnservant to be as compelling as the other three. Even though Bakool Ja Ja would be a bad ruler, I personally find his motivations to be more compelling than Wuk Lamat and would prefer to try to reform him instead of continuing on with Lamatyi.

I unfortunately didn't start dawntrail yet so I'll take your word. I'm not used to alt job leveling so it's taking a while since I want to main viper from now on and want to hang up my black mage mantle. (no idea where I got the idea to main blm as a complete noob but sure was fun)

I know it sounds a waste of resources and money but I'd like to see 2 male and 2 female voice options with the added choice to stay mute for the wol.