I had a longer review written, but... Hmm...
There's this interview that plays in my head a lot. Someone brings up how popular Zero (a dashing genderweird character introduced in 6.1) is and Naoki Yoshida - the game's producer, director, and member of Square Enix's board - awkwardly mumbles out that he didn't quite expect people to love her so much.
This is innocent on the surface, but to me it was a huge head tilter at the time.
See, FFXIV has a problem with misogyny. Whether it's inconsequential shit like "Minfilia polled terribly with players, so we killed her and turned her into a mcguffin", Yotsuyu's weird allergory for comfort women turning sour in Stormblood postpatch, Ysayle/Moenbryda (self-explanatory), the double standard invoked with the fates of Fordola compared to Gaius Baelsar, the incredible overuse of sexual assault references in dialogue up until late Stormblood, or Lyse getting written out of the story because people hated her, there's a lot to chew on regarding misogyny.
It's sort of a "joke" (insofar as banal reality can be humorous) among woman-liking FFXIV fans that pretty much any new woman introduced will probably either die or be written out. Venat implicitly (in the Japanese text, explicitly) being denied reincarnation while the setting's equivalent to Super Hitler gets to constantly appear in flashbacks was just the nail in the coffin.
I bring this up because 6.5 is bad. It's not bad in the same ways 6.0 was bad - Natsuko Ishikawa's uncomfortably Imperial Japan sympathizing fingers are at a minimum barring 6.4 - but it's bad in more banal, eyebrow-raising ways.
To avoid burying the lede: 6.5 smacks of both swift, lazy rewrites and also creative sterility.
After 5 patches of overwritten, backtracking-padded, unsatisfying buildup, 6.5 just dispenses with most of the stakes and conflict to say "Beat Zeromus and Golbez will be a good guy!". You get an admittedly decent trial out of it before Zero abruptly becomes a Paladin with little fanfare (mirroring Cecil's iconic moment from FF4, but terrible) and surprise Golbez is a good guy.
Zero thanks you for your friendship and aid, before declaring that she's going off to the same not-relevant closet as Lyse and demanding you don't ever come knocking for her.
Honestly, as an aside: XIV's format is killing it. There is no real reason for 6.4 to not have the Scions immediately leap in to fight Zeromus other than the devs needing to do another patch. It sucks so much.
"Zero was intended to die but they changed their mind last minute" is, at the time of writing, a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, it's a believable one.
What's really telling to me, both about the void arc's development and also the reception Endwalker got, is that this patch opens with an incredibly lazy and overbearing Shadowbringers nostalgia trip. Needing Light for a storyline that should've ended last patch, you and Zero hop over to the First and meet all of your Shadowbringers friends! Hurray!
Except... Look, even putting aside my negative bias (I consider Shadowbringers the worst XIV expansion) it just reads incredibly poorly. It's an abrupt plot stopper, is mostly unvoiced filler dialogue/quests that serve no purpose than to tug at the player's nostalgia, and genuinely does not matter at all until the very end.
This is alarming, at least to me, because they did this after Stormblood (an expansion Japan infamously despises to this day) what with the sudden surge of Ishgard/Heavensward references and Aymeric being your BFFL all of a sudden in Ghimlyt, the nuking of Stormblood plot threads in Shadowbringers, plus the very abrupt resurrection of Zenos and the sudden announcement of a whole event centered on Ishgard - the first and so far last of its kind.
Lastly, the dungeon of this patch is a cheap rehash of Amaurot but because nobody gives a flying fuck about the storyline it has all the impact of picking up a plate with a towel and it sliding back into the basin.
All of this combines into a package that, honestly? Pisses me off personally. The Void and everything around it has long since been one of the most int- [remembers what games I'm talking about] least boring parts of the setting and it's essentially gelded, its sole promising voiced NPC neutered, all to... idk, shove the single remaining plot thread from pre-Ishikawa days in the trash and move onto Dawntrail?
Other reviews have said it already and I'm adding my voice to the chorus: I think FFXIV has went on too long.
I only have so much tolerance for drab cutscenes with the same canned animations, the same WoL responses, the same bad audio mixing that feels like mics are about to peak, the same annoying placid and uninventive BGM that I've been hearing since 2013. I have even less tolerance for quest design that hasn't changed since I left education - and it was the same when I went into it!
I want to lie and say that maybe Dawntrail will be better, but... Will it?
I forgave a lot of XIV's bullshit because the writers had a series of curtains drawn that I was eager to peek behind.
The curtains are open now, and despite my hopes they are indeed blue.
Will Dawntrail be any good? Will it deviant from dungeons/trials at odd levels, playing Machinations whenever it's safe to skip a cutscene, overly choreographed duties that're aimed at people who have panic attacks when asked to use tank stance, mediocre writing which betrays the writers' uncomfortable opinions on Imperial Japan's colonization efforts, and music which occasionally rises above "fine" but is mostly just forgettable BGM unless you're in a duty?
Beats me.
[The review has functionally ended here, I'm now just talking to myself.]
I've seen a lot of comparisons to TV shows and the MCU when talking about how exhausted FFXIV's formula is, and while I agree to an extent (I am an ex-Red vs Blue fan.) I think with games it's actually worse.
I alluded to it up above, but games being tired and going on too long is far more noticeable than in other mediums besides maybe music (shoutout to BFMV for making Fever for a decade straight).
It terrifies me that FFXIV is somehow one of SE's top earning games (barring this year, where their MMO division lost money for the first time in a while) but it feels so cheap. The same animations, the same music, the same format. For a decade, nothing but empty field areas and inconsequential yellow quests and 3 alliance raids and 12 normal raids and Hildebrand and five post-patches. A trial before you hit level cap, then a back-to-back dungeon and trial. Main leitmotif for the final boss. Final boss is a well intentioned extremist.
Over and over and over...
It's strange, too. I've recently gotten super into Granblue Fantasy, and it feels like a mirror into a better world. A better FFXIV. It, too, is a decade-spanning pseudo-MMO that's had to deal with the pains of being a GaaS title, yet it's managed to innovate within itself. Fights only get cooler and cooler as time goes on, characer kits manage to be relatively interesting without being a straight upgrade to existing characters (though these still exist), their writing has matured from its infancy, and the art/visuals/music only get better every month.
Sure, it has gacha money, but FFXIV is one of SE's top earners, yet it feels cheaper than some games I've played that were literally made by 10-15 Chinese folks in a shed.
I don't actually think CBU3 are entirely to blame. They are absolutely to blame for XIV's weirdly conservative stances on things, bad writing, and overexertion of creative control (STOP FORCING SOKEN TO MAKE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.), but I think most problems I've talked about here can be traced back to both the very strict "5 post-patches, then an expansion every two years" shit and chronic mismanagement/underfunding.
I know Naoki Yoshida is everyone's parasocial best friend who can do no wrong, but c'mon. Fumbling FF16 despite having infinite Mainline Final Fantasy money can't say anything good about his capabilities.
As I wrote this all out I found myself longing for Stormblood. I don't like Stormblood (or anything in XIV anymore, really, I just came back to get my IRLs prepped for Dawntrail) but...
Hm.
I don't know how much the devs really care about FFXIV, especially as Yoshida continually looks more withdrawn and disinterested with each fanfest, but as a simple end user it just feels like Stormblood was the last time they were firing on all cylinders. The duties were great - in side content especially - the field areas were gorgeous, the music had so much flavour compared to ShB and EW's morose slop, and for just a brief moment in this game's gargantuan lifespan I was actually interested in where the individual location plots went.
I don't feel the same way about everything after it. Shadowbringers was, in hindsight, the developers panicking after Stormblood's reception and throwing the player into a world divorced of the icky plot threads/women they so despise, and Endwalker was Endwalker.
Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.
But when you offer the player a dialogue choice to voice their discontent at being forced to meddle in Tural's affairs, only for G'raha Tia to smile and tell you "nawwww it'll be fun :)" I can't help but wonder.
P.S: This patch was so bad I actually forget Vrtra was there, despite Azdaja being the instigating incident. Imagine.
There's this interview that plays in my head a lot. Someone brings up how popular Zero (a dashing genderweird character introduced in 6.1) is and Naoki Yoshida - the game's producer, director, and member of Square Enix's board - awkwardly mumbles out that he didn't quite expect people to love her so much.
This is innocent on the surface, but to me it was a huge head tilter at the time.
See, FFXIV has a problem with misogyny. Whether it's inconsequential shit like "Minfilia polled terribly with players, so we killed her and turned her into a mcguffin", Yotsuyu's weird allergory for comfort women turning sour in Stormblood postpatch, Ysayle/Moenbryda (self-explanatory), the double standard invoked with the fates of Fordola compared to Gaius Baelsar, the incredible overuse of sexual assault references in dialogue up until late Stormblood, or Lyse getting written out of the story because people hated her, there's a lot to chew on regarding misogyny.
It's sort of a "joke" (insofar as banal reality can be humorous) among woman-liking FFXIV fans that pretty much any new woman introduced will probably either die or be written out. Venat implicitly (in the Japanese text, explicitly) being denied reincarnation while the setting's equivalent to Super Hitler gets to constantly appear in flashbacks was just the nail in the coffin.
I bring this up because 6.5 is bad. It's not bad in the same ways 6.0 was bad - Natsuko Ishikawa's uncomfortably Imperial Japan sympathizing fingers are at a minimum barring 6.4 - but it's bad in more banal, eyebrow-raising ways.
To avoid burying the lede: 6.5 smacks of both swift, lazy rewrites and also creative sterility.
After 5 patches of overwritten, backtracking-padded, unsatisfying buildup, 6.5 just dispenses with most of the stakes and conflict to say "Beat Zeromus and Golbez will be a good guy!". You get an admittedly decent trial out of it before Zero abruptly becomes a Paladin with little fanfare (mirroring Cecil's iconic moment from FF4, but terrible) and surprise Golbez is a good guy.
Zero thanks you for your friendship and aid, before declaring that she's going off to the same not-relevant closet as Lyse and demanding you don't ever come knocking for her.
Honestly, as an aside: XIV's format is killing it. There is no real reason for 6.4 to not have the Scions immediately leap in to fight Zeromus other than the devs needing to do another patch. It sucks so much.
"Zero was intended to die but they changed their mind last minute" is, at the time of writing, a conspiracy theory. Nonetheless, it's a believable one.
What's really telling to me, both about the void arc's development and also the reception Endwalker got, is that this patch opens with an incredibly lazy and overbearing Shadowbringers nostalgia trip. Needing Light for a storyline that should've ended last patch, you and Zero hop over to the First and meet all of your Shadowbringers friends! Hurray!
Except... Look, even putting aside my negative bias (I consider Shadowbringers the worst XIV expansion) it just reads incredibly poorly. It's an abrupt plot stopper, is mostly unvoiced filler dialogue/quests that serve no purpose than to tug at the player's nostalgia, and genuinely does not matter at all until the very end.
This is alarming, at least to me, because they did this after Stormblood (an expansion Japan infamously despises to this day) what with the sudden surge of Ishgard/Heavensward references and Aymeric being your BFFL all of a sudden in Ghimlyt, the nuking of Stormblood plot threads in Shadowbringers, plus the very abrupt resurrection of Zenos and the sudden announcement of a whole event centered on Ishgard - the first and so far last of its kind.
Lastly, the dungeon of this patch is a cheap rehash of Amaurot but because nobody gives a flying fuck about the storyline it has all the impact of picking up a plate with a towel and it sliding back into the basin.
All of this combines into a package that, honestly? Pisses me off personally. The Void and everything around it has long since been one of the most int- [remembers what games I'm talking about] least boring parts of the setting and it's essentially gelded, its sole promising voiced NPC neutered, all to... idk, shove the single remaining plot thread from pre-Ishikawa days in the trash and move onto Dawntrail?
Other reviews have said it already and I'm adding my voice to the chorus: I think FFXIV has went on too long.
I only have so much tolerance for drab cutscenes with the same canned animations, the same WoL responses, the same bad audio mixing that feels like mics are about to peak, the same annoying placid and uninventive BGM that I've been hearing since 2013. I have even less tolerance for quest design that hasn't changed since I left education - and it was the same when I went into it!
I want to lie and say that maybe Dawntrail will be better, but... Will it?
I forgave a lot of XIV's bullshit because the writers had a series of curtains drawn that I was eager to peek behind.
The curtains are open now, and despite my hopes they are indeed blue.
Will Dawntrail be any good? Will it deviant from dungeons/trials at odd levels, playing Machinations whenever it's safe to skip a cutscene, overly choreographed duties that're aimed at people who have panic attacks when asked to use tank stance, mediocre writing which betrays the writers' uncomfortable opinions on Imperial Japan's colonization efforts, and music which occasionally rises above "fine" but is mostly just forgettable BGM unless you're in a duty?
Beats me.
[The review has functionally ended here, I'm now just talking to myself.]
I've seen a lot of comparisons to TV shows and the MCU when talking about how exhausted FFXIV's formula is, and while I agree to an extent (I am an ex-Red vs Blue fan.) I think with games it's actually worse.
I alluded to it up above, but games being tired and going on too long is far more noticeable than in other mediums besides maybe music (shoutout to BFMV for making Fever for a decade straight).
It terrifies me that FFXIV is somehow one of SE's top earning games (barring this year, where their MMO division lost money for the first time in a while) but it feels so cheap. The same animations, the same music, the same format. For a decade, nothing but empty field areas and inconsequential yellow quests and 3 alliance raids and 12 normal raids and Hildebrand and five post-patches. A trial before you hit level cap, then a back-to-back dungeon and trial. Main leitmotif for the final boss. Final boss is a well intentioned extremist.
Over and over and over...
It's strange, too. I've recently gotten super into Granblue Fantasy, and it feels like a mirror into a better world. A better FFXIV. It, too, is a decade-spanning pseudo-MMO that's had to deal with the pains of being a GaaS title, yet it's managed to innovate within itself. Fights only get cooler and cooler as time goes on, characer kits manage to be relatively interesting without being a straight upgrade to existing characters (though these still exist), their writing has matured from its infancy, and the art/visuals/music only get better every month.
Sure, it has gacha money, but FFXIV is one of SE's top earners, yet it feels cheaper than some games I've played that were literally made by 10-15 Chinese folks in a shed.
I don't actually think CBU3 are entirely to blame. They are absolutely to blame for XIV's weirdly conservative stances on things, bad writing, and overexertion of creative control (STOP FORCING SOKEN TO MAKE ORCHESTRAL MUSIC.), but I think most problems I've talked about here can be traced back to both the very strict "5 post-patches, then an expansion every two years" shit and chronic mismanagement/underfunding.
I know Naoki Yoshida is everyone's parasocial best friend who can do no wrong, but c'mon. Fumbling FF16 despite having infinite Mainline Final Fantasy money can't say anything good about his capabilities.
As I wrote this all out I found myself longing for Stormblood. I don't like Stormblood (or anything in XIV anymore, really, I just came back to get my IRLs prepped for Dawntrail) but...
Hm.
I don't know how much the devs really care about FFXIV, especially as Yoshida continually looks more withdrawn and disinterested with each fanfest, but as a simple end user it just feels like Stormblood was the last time they were firing on all cylinders. The duties were great - in side content especially - the field areas were gorgeous, the music had so much flavour compared to ShB and EW's morose slop, and for just a brief moment in this game's gargantuan lifespan I was actually interested in where the individual location plots went.
I don't feel the same way about everything after it. Shadowbringers was, in hindsight, the developers panicking after Stormblood's reception and throwing the player into a world divorced of the icky plot threads/women they so despise, and Endwalker was Endwalker.
Am I just projecting my own discontent? Probably.
But when you offer the player a dialogue choice to voice their discontent at being forced to meddle in Tural's affairs, only for G'raha Tia to smile and tell you "nawwww it'll be fun :)" I can't help but wonder.
P.S: This patch was so bad I actually forget Vrtra was there, despite Azdaja being the instigating incident. Imagine.
11 Comments
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real great write-up. as time goes on I'm more and more certain that this game's a dead end in almost every conceivable way. glad I didn't bother with 6.x
I want to suplex the next person to praise emet or g'raha
@curse A week ago I would've went "nah" to my chagrin, but SE's MMO division finally lost money this year. Maybe it's a dead end literally - nah jk content tourists will keep it afloat to see their catgirl.
I do think that creatively the game has exhausted itself; Shadowbringers kinda hinted at it because they went into the "ooooo everything was an Ascian plot" shit about 5 years before they were scheduled to hit bad-design parity with World of Warcraft and Endwalker wasn't really much more than Ishikawa wiping the board clean so you can experience bottle episodes forever. Aren't you excited to experience Heavensward for the rest of your life?
And yeah, I find it amusing that so many G'raha/Emet/Zenos/Estinien/Thancred likers I know have a dim view of ~gacha waifus~ only to get suckered by characters with equal or lesser amounts of depth just because their dick likes what it sees. Like, c'mon, just admit you're horny. You don't need to defend Super Hitler.
(This also goes for people who make liking XIV's women their entire personality - their gooning vs my sapphic appreciation yada yada yada)
I do think that creatively the game has exhausted itself; Shadowbringers kinda hinted at it because they went into the "ooooo everything was an Ascian plot" shit about 5 years before they were scheduled to hit bad-design parity with World of Warcraft and Endwalker wasn't really much more than Ishikawa wiping the board clean so you can experience bottle episodes forever. Aren't you excited to experience Heavensward for the rest of your life?
And yeah, I find it amusing that so many G'raha/Emet/Zenos/Estinien/Thancred likers I know have a dim view of ~gacha waifus~ only to get suckered by characters with equal or lesser amounts of depth just because their dick likes what it sees. Like, c'mon, just admit you're horny. You don't need to defend Super Hitler.
(This also goes for people who make liking XIV's women their entire personality - their gooning vs my sapphic appreciation yada yada yada)
@01156 I can relate <---- ten year player, only here cause it's an unavoidable force in my social circles and my IRLs sometimes play it.
It's eternally weird to me that Yoshida and the crew continually claim to be hardcore fans of past FF games only to reduce them to cheap motifs, callbacks and dead-air filling that can only be read as disrespectful. Like c'mon, did they genuinely sit down and think the fuckass Void plot was a heartfelt homage to FF4? Even people I know who still like this game think it's cheeks and those idiots are still insisting Zenos needs more screentime.
I can relate to the general burnout though; it took years for the discontent to build and shatter but seeing Emet get a haha funny sendoff at the end of EW (which the devs admitted was to stop people unsubbing) was the final incident. It's a bit of an odd case, perhaps the first in a GaaS, where I've realized that the developers changed the target audience entirely and it no longer encompasses me. Like, sorry bros, I'm not here for this softcore otome-shonen hybrid shit, I don't give a damn about G'raha Tia or a now-flanderised Estinien or Urianger who has the same character arc every expansion.
Can also sympathize with the disgust re: the community. Truthfully I think it was finally seeing just how bad the XIV community was first-hand that started my overall burnout with the game. People will make up excuses like "oh it's just bad on social media", but after the Great Shadowbringers Player Boom it's seeped into the actual game. There's terfs and bigots openly chatting in shout chat down in Ul'dah, the same kind of harassment/petty stalking/catfights you expect from ex-Secon Life users, and a lot of general unpleasantness in DF/PF. Etiquette has gone out the window and "tank stance pls" is now seen as a hostile action than a glib reminder. I could write another ten paragraphs about the unfounded dev worship, but you're evidently just as familiar as I am.
Even typing this + the review out is bittersweet. Like you, XIV ignited a creative fire under me. The fics I wrote for both Yotsuyu/WoL and Yotsuyu/Yugiri are still at the top of the pile on AO3 and, even by my own standards, I made so many OCs for this game. Think the final count was 60-something - after Endwalker I sat down and was making like two every day minimum.
But I look at the Dawntrail ad on my Facebook timeline rn and I treat it with the same scorn as I do generic Genshin clone doomed to fail in 2 years #19432423950-932453.
It's eternally weird to me that Yoshida and the crew continually claim to be hardcore fans of past FF games only to reduce them to cheap motifs, callbacks and dead-air filling that can only be read as disrespectful. Like c'mon, did they genuinely sit down and think the fuckass Void plot was a heartfelt homage to FF4? Even people I know who still like this game think it's cheeks and those idiots are still insisting Zenos needs more screentime.
I can relate to the general burnout though; it took years for the discontent to build and shatter but seeing Emet get a haha funny sendoff at the end of EW (which the devs admitted was to stop people unsubbing) was the final incident. It's a bit of an odd case, perhaps the first in a GaaS, where I've realized that the developers changed the target audience entirely and it no longer encompasses me. Like, sorry bros, I'm not here for this softcore otome-shonen hybrid shit, I don't give a damn about G'raha Tia or a now-flanderised Estinien or Urianger who has the same character arc every expansion.
Can also sympathize with the disgust re: the community. Truthfully I think it was finally seeing just how bad the XIV community was first-hand that started my overall burnout with the game. People will make up excuses like "oh it's just bad on social media", but after the Great Shadowbringers Player Boom it's seeped into the actual game. There's terfs and bigots openly chatting in shout chat down in Ul'dah, the same kind of harassment/petty stalking/catfights you expect from ex-Secon Life users, and a lot of general unpleasantness in DF/PF. Etiquette has gone out the window and "tank stance pls" is now seen as a hostile action than a glib reminder. I could write another ten paragraphs about the unfounded dev worship, but you're evidently just as familiar as I am.
Even typing this + the review out is bittersweet. Like you, XIV ignited a creative fire under me. The fics I wrote for both Yotsuyu/WoL and Yotsuyu/Yugiri are still at the top of the pile on AO3 and, even by my own standards, I made so many OCs for this game. Think the final count was 60-something - after Endwalker I sat down and was making like two every day minimum.
But I look at the Dawntrail ad on my Facebook timeline rn and I treat it with the same scorn as I do generic Genshin clone doomed to fail in 2 years #19432423950-932453.
I got into the game with my friends after Endwalker hit, so I don't have any nostalgia for lost bars or whatever. Heck, I have no other MMO experience either. It says a lot about how fun playing with friends is that it consumed us all for like 6 months and 1500 hours and then I got bored and quit and only remember the parts that were bad (most of it.) I like the hater energy here because I only see people who are still reeling from the time Y'shtola gave the world's most tepid burn to an uncomfortable stereotype in fake Mongolia
@MeowPewterMeow This only a tenth of my hater power.
And you bringing that scene up is funny, given one of the malice-coated potshots I deleted from this ramble was one about how XIV fans seem to only remember voiced cutscenes. Not that I blame them, the text is often banal and overly faux-Shakespearian, but still.
And you bringing that scene up is funny, given one of the malice-coated potshots I deleted from this ramble was one about how XIV fans seem to only remember voiced cutscenes. Not that I blame them, the text is often banal and overly faux-Shakespearian, but still.
Good review. It's nice to know that there's someone else out there who thinks the formula in XIV is getting worse and shares the same doubts that the developers know what they're doing. I haven't been playing this game as long as you, only since 2020 but right before everyone and their mother bandwagoned, but the massive drop in quality in Endwalker was absolutely glaring.
I remember reading an interview (sorry for the reddit link, all I can find: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/tg7lgz/spoiler_60_famitsu_interview_with_yoshida/) that said Ishikawa hadn't even started writing EW's story until the end of 5.2. I remember thinking, wow, what an incredible thing to admit that totally inspires confidence in successfully wrapping up a 10 year long story arc. And boy, does it really, really show in the writing. The Scions were nothing more than cardboard cutouts that tell you what to do (as they have been for the past 5 years), Zenos was still a shitty Sephiroth (as he always was), and Emet still sucks. I truly felt like I was losing my mind seeing so many people praising EW's story as "the greatest JRPG story ever told", like holy shit please play other games. I noticed the community got 10x worse after EW as people were extremely quick to leap down someone's throat and accuse them of griefing if we happened to wipe in an alliance raid. I remember when 6.whatever dropped and I queued into the not-even-12-hours-old Troia dungeon and the tank immediately put a marker over their head as if they couldn't be bothered to let people wander and, god forbid, make mistakes in a brand new dungeon.
I extremely doubt that I'm even going to bother with Dawntrail, given how they've already deleted the main mechanic of Astrologian and how much I despised Endwalker. Anyway, rant over, thanks for reading.
I remember reading an interview (sorry for the reddit link, all I can find: https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/tg7lgz/spoiler_60_famitsu_interview_with_yoshida/) that said Ishikawa hadn't even started writing EW's story until the end of 5.2. I remember thinking, wow, what an incredible thing to admit that totally inspires confidence in successfully wrapping up a 10 year long story arc. And boy, does it really, really show in the writing. The Scions were nothing more than cardboard cutouts that tell you what to do (as they have been for the past 5 years), Zenos was still a shitty Sephiroth (as he always was), and Emet still sucks. I truly felt like I was losing my mind seeing so many people praising EW's story as "the greatest JRPG story ever told", like holy shit please play other games. I noticed the community got 10x worse after EW as people were extremely quick to leap down someone's throat and accuse them of griefing if we happened to wipe in an alliance raid. I remember when 6.whatever dropped and I queued into the not-even-12-hours-old Troia dungeon and the tank immediately put a marker over their head as if they couldn't be bothered to let people wander and, god forbid, make mistakes in a brand new dungeon.
I extremely doubt that I'm even going to bother with Dawntrail, given how they've already deleted the main mechanic of Astrologian and how much I despised Endwalker. Anyway, rant over, thanks for reading.
@tunasalad Funny you mention that interview, because it comes up every other week in my personal server's FF channel because even years later we still can't believe Ishikawa and Yoshida admitted everything is written by the seat of their pants. That interview, more than anything, is what nuked a lot of my goodwill towards XIV - not just EW, but other parts I liked.
And yeah the community got way worse in both etiquette and basic skill. Even on my relatively reserved DC (Light), manners and consideration for others have went out the window - rude weirdos used to be so rare that I actually wrote them down, but now they're so common my blacklist is growing full.
Also people just suck now, even in EW content. My friends and I dread getting Zodiark or Hydaelyn in roulettes because we keep running into people who're level 90 but barely know how to play their class. I can forgive it in ARR-HW but these days we've started just taking the leaver's penalty and waiting it out with a quick Youtube video or something. I'm tired of carrying people, dude. I'm convinced the Trust system nuked the skill level of the playerbase, resulting in tons of players coasting through dungeons and then being dead weight in trials.
I can sympathize with feeling insane, too. When EW dropped I saw so many people tearily admit that it was the most profound JRPG story they'd ever experienced and the HATER in me had to fight not to scream "PLAY MORE GAMES, FUCK". The average Korean VN runs rings around this entire game let alone EW.
And yeah the community got way worse in both etiquette and basic skill. Even on my relatively reserved DC (Light), manners and consideration for others have went out the window - rude weirdos used to be so rare that I actually wrote them down, but now they're so common my blacklist is growing full.
Also people just suck now, even in EW content. My friends and I dread getting Zodiark or Hydaelyn in roulettes because we keep running into people who're level 90 but barely know how to play their class. I can forgive it in ARR-HW but these days we've started just taking the leaver's penalty and waiting it out with a quick Youtube video or something. I'm tired of carrying people, dude. I'm convinced the Trust system nuked the skill level of the playerbase, resulting in tons of players coasting through dungeons and then being dead weight in trials.
I can sympathize with feeling insane, too. When EW dropped I saw so many people tearily admit that it was the most profound JRPG story they'd ever experienced and the HATER in me had to fight not to scream "PLAY MORE GAMES, FUCK". The average Korean VN runs rings around this entire game let alone EW.
@MiraMiraOTW Hell, just in the last week, I was running the Omphalos raid and two tanks were fighting over MT and spinning the boss around--extremely annoying--when our tank asked the other one if they could MT, they were like "yeah sure!" which I thought was a nice change of pace for once, but not even a moment later they said, "it's not like I have better heals and mits and gear and dps" it was like oh so they were just being sarcastic, cool. 10 minutes later a healer rescued their innocent tank into a clump of people mid-TB, slaughtered 75% of the alliance then had the nerve to say, "Hey guys avoid tankbusters/aoes when you can!". I seriously wonder what happened in between post-SH to now, it feels like there's always some dickhead waiting to throw a wrench into the process.
@tunasalad Yeah, far too often have I seen people in post-HW content (which, imo, is where you should know how to play the game) grief either accidentally or on purpose by dragging stack markers away from people, or meteor markers into people.
I actually hope they expand trusts to every other duty type so I can play with people that know how to behave around other players.
I actually hope they expand trusts to every other duty type so I can play with people that know how to behave around other players.
01156
27 days ago
to discover FFXIV has only grown worse and worse in my absence and, as you say, zero has received the game's female character fate worse than death, fails to surprise me yet remains a disappointment. i really do second the sentiment this hulking beast and its "uwu positive and nice but ignoring what occurs when you solo join in party finder or if you dare criticise the game in reasonable ways" community has carried on for far too long and i simply can't understand how players at large tolerate it anymore. i really admire your enlightening commentary regarding the development team as well as i feel they only ever receive praise instead of the same scrutinising lens many other titles are reviewed under.
and like it's kinda heartbreaking for me? there were years long periods of my life where i was so ride or die on my fanart and projects and wol narrative development and i'm still so absolutely sweet on my and my friend's characters being besties forever. i look back on those drawings now with this really awkward pit in my stomach seeing the current state of the game and how i don't think anything could bring me back this time. this got really long! my apologies for jumpscaring you with a longass mention, i just really truly resonated with what you said here. thank you for another really great read here on bl