Before I start, I recommend reading my review of A Realm Reborn, given that it's a continuation.
A Realm Awoken is the inbetween patch between A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. As such, it's design goals were to build the story up until the next expansion, but also to give players something to do while they developed said expansion.
The designer brain in me is understanding in what they've had to do. The need for new content in an MMO is paramount for letting the hardcore players stay satisfied, and it's a tough battle to keep your player base occupied while you're working on the next big thing. MMOs are a live service, and that requires consistent updates.
The gamer part of my brain wants to violently throw up at merely the thought of having to do the originally set 100 main scenario quests instead of the chopped down 80.
It's not like I really enjoyed a majority of those 80 quests either. ESPECIALLY in the beginning. At times, it was worse than my experience with ARR. But as the game progressed, specifically as Moenbryda arrived, the game suddenly caught my attention. Here's a character that has a personality, a bit of charm with the rest of the cast, someone who resembles something human-like in this sea of cardboard!
It was as if a switch was flipped within the writing, where characters started being written as characters, and not as pure dumps of information. Characters who I held no real interest for up until this point, suddenly started becoming somewhat charming. Characters like Aymeric and Haurchefant began to demand attention from the screen, holding my interest rather than reading the words on screen and barely retaining any of it. I began to keep track of what's happening in the plot, and can actually recall things that happened in the plot! I found myself wondering "oh, I wonder what will happen next?".
... At this point, I feel like I'm giving praise to someone for knowing how to breathe.
I've learned of a basic story-telling technique recently that has helped put in perspective much of what XIV's story short comings have been. Basically, if your story's plot beats follow from each other with the word "and then", your story is going to be incredibly boring. Compelling stories are about consequences of actions and how they flow from one another.
"The Warrior of Light defeated the first primal. Then the second primal. Then he defeated the third primal. And then the fourth one."
Those have been the main plot beats to A Realm Reborn, and it's so boring, it's incredibly nothing, there's no movement in what's happening. You can jam your epic fantasy lore in all you want, but if the basis for your story can be boiled down to "and then this happened", then it's NOT interesting.
It doesn't help too that plot points have been stretched thin due to the sheer amount of quests needed to set up some of the bigger moments found within A Realm Awoken's story. It's stretched so thin and only begins to pay off towards the end, where we're exiled from the home we've been protecting from being falsely accused of assassinating the Ul'Dah Queen. I'm beginning to see inklings of a good story being set up, but it took way, way, WAY too long to set us up for this. It's hard to get emotionally attached to character betrayals, deaths, etc when you're basically only beginning to like some of these characters. At this point, it's a brand new beginning.
As for the actual gameplay, it's strangely... experimental? What's interesting about experiencing a live service game, as I'm learning, is that you get to see in real time a team learning what works and what doesn't. ARA has a bunch of experimental content, with large raids with the Crystal Towers, to a weird full on battle to fight a dragon, to what was supposedly meant to be the new way content was to be dished out with blue quests like Primal Awakening. To me, none of these experiments really did much for me, and were apparently much worse at launch than they were now. It is interesting that all your design mistakes will be shown in an MMORPG. It's interesting too, that you can then rectify mistakes much later down the line. The developers finally decided that the Scions needed a base of operations that you could actually TELEPORT to, rectifying an asinine decision that I have no idea how it was even made. It's your MAIN SCENARIO QUEST, the one where players are CONSTANTLY going to head towards, and you don't even make a teleport point there for it???
I'm still not very keen on Final Fantasy XIV. It's improved since A Realm Reborn, for sure. I'm at the very least going to continue on to Heavensward and finish it. I just don't know if Heavensward can convince me that all the time spent disliking the game will be justified. With how much praise it's received from pretty much everyone I know, it is apparently the hook-line-sinker for the game. Is it worth the trouble? Am I really going to do a true 180 on this game? Is Jin'wey Akiyama's story going to be continued all the way to the finish line?
Find out in the next episode of Final Fantasy XIV titled "Heavensward: aka Jin'wey Akiyama's Big Break"
A Realm Awoken is the inbetween patch between A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. As such, it's design goals were to build the story up until the next expansion, but also to give players something to do while they developed said expansion.
The designer brain in me is understanding in what they've had to do. The need for new content in an MMO is paramount for letting the hardcore players stay satisfied, and it's a tough battle to keep your player base occupied while you're working on the next big thing. MMOs are a live service, and that requires consistent updates.
The gamer part of my brain wants to violently throw up at merely the thought of having to do the originally set 100 main scenario quests instead of the chopped down 80.
It's not like I really enjoyed a majority of those 80 quests either. ESPECIALLY in the beginning. At times, it was worse than my experience with ARR. But as the game progressed, specifically as Moenbryda arrived, the game suddenly caught my attention. Here's a character that has a personality, a bit of charm with the rest of the cast, someone who resembles something human-like in this sea of cardboard!
It was as if a switch was flipped within the writing, where characters started being written as characters, and not as pure dumps of information. Characters who I held no real interest for up until this point, suddenly started becoming somewhat charming. Characters like Aymeric and Haurchefant began to demand attention from the screen, holding my interest rather than reading the words on screen and barely retaining any of it. I began to keep track of what's happening in the plot, and can actually recall things that happened in the plot! I found myself wondering "oh, I wonder what will happen next?".
... At this point, I feel like I'm giving praise to someone for knowing how to breathe.
I've learned of a basic story-telling technique recently that has helped put in perspective much of what XIV's story short comings have been. Basically, if your story's plot beats follow from each other with the word "and then", your story is going to be incredibly boring. Compelling stories are about consequences of actions and how they flow from one another.
"The Warrior of Light defeated the first primal. Then the second primal. Then he defeated the third primal. And then the fourth one."
Those have been the main plot beats to A Realm Reborn, and it's so boring, it's incredibly nothing, there's no movement in what's happening. You can jam your epic fantasy lore in all you want, but if the basis for your story can be boiled down to "and then this happened", then it's NOT interesting.
It doesn't help too that plot points have been stretched thin due to the sheer amount of quests needed to set up some of the bigger moments found within A Realm Awoken's story. It's stretched so thin and only begins to pay off towards the end, where we're exiled from the home we've been protecting from being falsely accused of assassinating the Ul'Dah Queen. I'm beginning to see inklings of a good story being set up, but it took way, way, WAY too long to set us up for this. It's hard to get emotionally attached to character betrayals, deaths, etc when you're basically only beginning to like some of these characters. At this point, it's a brand new beginning.
As for the actual gameplay, it's strangely... experimental? What's interesting about experiencing a live service game, as I'm learning, is that you get to see in real time a team learning what works and what doesn't. ARA has a bunch of experimental content, with large raids with the Crystal Towers, to a weird full on battle to fight a dragon, to what was supposedly meant to be the new way content was to be dished out with blue quests like Primal Awakening. To me, none of these experiments really did much for me, and were apparently much worse at launch than they were now. It is interesting that all your design mistakes will be shown in an MMORPG. It's interesting too, that you can then rectify mistakes much later down the line. The developers finally decided that the Scions needed a base of operations that you could actually TELEPORT to, rectifying an asinine decision that I have no idea how it was even made. It's your MAIN SCENARIO QUEST, the one where players are CONSTANTLY going to head towards, and you don't even make a teleport point there for it???
I'm still not very keen on Final Fantasy XIV. It's improved since A Realm Reborn, for sure. I'm at the very least going to continue on to Heavensward and finish it. I just don't know if Heavensward can convince me that all the time spent disliking the game will be justified. With how much praise it's received from pretty much everyone I know, it is apparently the hook-line-sinker for the game. Is it worth the trouble? Am I really going to do a true 180 on this game? Is Jin'wey Akiyama's story going to be continued all the way to the finish line?
Find out in the next episode of Final Fantasy XIV titled "Heavensward: aka Jin'wey Akiyama's Big Break"