I am practically the "played a game for thousands of hours, thinks it's trash" meme incarnate. To clarify, I don't think the game is trash, but I'd struggle to recommend it to brand new players.
(fair warning, I wrote a lot of words here, probably way more than I'll ever care to on any other game I'll log on this website)
I first played this back in 2014 before Heavensward was released and had already spent a large amount of hours in this game. The game looked oh so pretty (and still does, despite the dated engine and graphical limitations), it was full of references to older Final Fantasy games, and the core gameplay of cooperating with other players to tackle various types of dungeons, boss fights and open world events was so addictive. But the more I played, the more apparent its issues became.
While the world was full of neat little details and backstory, the main story was very simplistic, and this becomes even more grating as the game is full of silly quests, which makes the plot progression even longer. This doubles down as a negative towards the gameplay as well, for these numerous quests are mechanically simple (kill 'x' monsters, fetch 'y' items, go talk with that person and then come back) and they offer meager rewards.
Thinking about getting through these mind-numbing quests to get to the "good part" that is the endgame reminds me of the old internet arguments surrounding FFXIII: "it gets better after 25 hours!", except FFXIV took waaaay longer than that (and now, 3 expansion packs later, it takes even longer). And after defeating the silly main story villains and getting to the endgame? I'd meet a lot of toxic and/or lazy players. I'm not even talking about Extreme trials or the Binding Coil of Bahamut, no, just trying to run "casual" content like Pharos Sirius or The Lost City of Amdapor was a struggle. It sure felt good when everyone worked together to beat Diabolos, or one of the EX primals, or Twintania. But more often than not I'd get people playing the blaming game, insulting each other, and then abandoning the group (which would most likely disband afterwards due to low morale). On top of all that I was paying a monthly subscription to play this game with all these faults.
It's the year of 2019 when, among all the Shadowbringers hype, I finally decided to go back to FFXIV. I'm not going to comment much about the expansion packs here. As far as the base game is concerned, it is still a slog to progress (you may have heard they removed some of these quests somewhere mid 2020, but it still takes way too long to progress). The power creep makes old dungeons, like the aforementioned ones, much easier to beat, which is... a mixed bag. On one hand newer players can progress much more easily than before, but on the other they're much more boring and won't be teaching the newer players anything about the importance of mechanics, or the importance of combat rotations, or the importance of working on your gear.
On top of that, the old EX trials and the Coil raids are pretty much abandoned (but the former are still required for quest completion, and the later has a pretty interesting story, surrounding the events of 1.0 and the fan-favorite character Alisaie, that many players will simply miss altogether). What a fantastic experience for brand new players it must be, to join an EX primal after a long queue wait, only to be yelled by a "mentor" telling you to stop queue'ing for older EX primals (you can thank the Mentor Roulette for that).
But on the bright side now you can experience all that for free.
(fair warning, I wrote a lot of words here, probably way more than I'll ever care to on any other game I'll log on this website)
I first played this back in 2014 before Heavensward was released and had already spent a large amount of hours in this game. The game looked oh so pretty (and still does, despite the dated engine and graphical limitations), it was full of references to older Final Fantasy games, and the core gameplay of cooperating with other players to tackle various types of dungeons, boss fights and open world events was so addictive. But the more I played, the more apparent its issues became.
While the world was full of neat little details and backstory, the main story was very simplistic, and this becomes even more grating as the game is full of silly quests, which makes the plot progression even longer. This doubles down as a negative towards the gameplay as well, for these numerous quests are mechanically simple (kill 'x' monsters, fetch 'y' items, go talk with that person and then come back) and they offer meager rewards.
Thinking about getting through these mind-numbing quests to get to the "good part" that is the endgame reminds me of the old internet arguments surrounding FFXIII: "it gets better after 25 hours!", except FFXIV took waaaay longer than that (and now, 3 expansion packs later, it takes even longer). And after defeating the silly main story villains and getting to the endgame? I'd meet a lot of toxic and/or lazy players. I'm not even talking about Extreme trials or the Binding Coil of Bahamut, no, just trying to run "casual" content like Pharos Sirius or The Lost City of Amdapor was a struggle. It sure felt good when everyone worked together to beat Diabolos, or one of the EX primals, or Twintania. But more often than not I'd get people playing the blaming game, insulting each other, and then abandoning the group (which would most likely disband afterwards due to low morale). On top of all that I was paying a monthly subscription to play this game with all these faults.
It's the year of 2019 when, among all the Shadowbringers hype, I finally decided to go back to FFXIV. I'm not going to comment much about the expansion packs here. As far as the base game is concerned, it is still a slog to progress (you may have heard they removed some of these quests somewhere mid 2020, but it still takes way too long to progress). The power creep makes old dungeons, like the aforementioned ones, much easier to beat, which is... a mixed bag. On one hand newer players can progress much more easily than before, but on the other they're much more boring and won't be teaching the newer players anything about the importance of mechanics, or the importance of combat rotations, or the importance of working on your gear.
On top of that, the old EX trials and the Coil raids are pretty much abandoned (but the former are still required for quest completion, and the later has a pretty interesting story, surrounding the events of 1.0 and the fan-favorite character Alisaie, that many players will simply miss altogether). What a fantastic experience for brand new players it must be, to join an EX primal after a long queue wait, only to be yelled by a "mentor" telling you to stop queue'ing for older EX primals (you can thank the Mentor Roulette for that).
But on the bright side now you can experience all that for free.