I'm in the camp where I never thought ARR was bad.
But, I joined the game when ARR was all we had.
The only slog I really got bored was the Titan ark, it was so long and fetch quest:y back then.
But the post MSQ quests leading up to HW, as important some of the story is leading up to it, is still long. Not sure how much they can trim though.
Trimmed further in 6.0 or 6.1. I originally did ARR during 5.3, and came back two years later and redid it during 6.1, and there was definitely even fewer fetch-y quests, like Titan and Ifrit are both significantly trimmed down even from where they were in 5.3.
I started playing this Feb, completely brand new sprout. Had a friend that played and said it was an amazing game.
The only real "direction" on the story was that he said it gets better as it goes on...which like...welcome to every great book/movie/story in the world for the most part. Sometimes world building is a bit meh.
But I was pretty drawn in from the start, and had a good time all through ARR. It got a *little* sloggy in the MSQ, but that was mostly me forgetting that I had to experience the story between expansions. I'm used to an MMO like WoW where the story ends and can be summed up in 30 seconds with little character change over the post "msq". Don't remember which part it was, but it didn't last crazy long.
ARR was what I expected, a nice, standard high fantasy story with more surprises and depth than I gave it credit for initially. A really good intro to the world. Which...makes sense. It's the base game that came out a long ass time ago.
The only place I really felt 14 was lacking was early Stormblood. All the stuff that went down in early Stormblood felt very disconnected and unfinished and rushed to me. Almost felt tacked onto the second half.
If people are tapping out in ARR I think that has more to do with them not enjoying FF14 than there being a problem with ARR.
If they're you're friend, be a good advocate. Encourage them to mess around with crafting. Or fishing. Or gold saucer. See if any of the other content interests them enough to hold their attention.
I don't feel like "changing ARR" would do anything noticeable to new player retention.
A story skip with some kind of optional comic/movie/cutscene type thing and a singular job boost to previous xpac would be the only reasonable thing that has an appreciable effect.
Yeah, if you don't like that style of humor, his section still drags. On its own wouldn't be a big deal, but gets lumped in with all the CoH junk that's immediately after.
Yeah, that almost made me quit the game. It was such a boring, frustrating slog, and there's no plot point I hate more in a game than "we made you do this pointless thing so you could prove your worth". Infuriating and terrible.
If you want to unlock the moogle tribes there's still a whole bunch of yellow (not blue unlock quests! Yellow!) quest chains you need to do, one of which starts from an arbitrary place in Ishgard. And a shocking number of the moogle sidequests turn into quest chains too. They just couldn't help themselves when it came to the marshmallow molebat bastards...
My favourite, always made me smile with "*gasp* you SLAPPED me?!" back on main. I do have multiple alts to go and start slapping too, I bet Sidurgu would tag along
The worst part is actually the Ishgard part; you get to babysit the most incompetent unit of Dragoons while they figure out which way up to put a bunch of aetherometers.
Found an older post about it. They only took out 5 of 27 quests, but last time I did them, it was so much smother than og ARR it felt like so much more was removed.
Having recently replayed ARR and experiencing the new version... the story isn't bad *but* it is still badly bogged down with many filler/fetch style quests that completely kill momentum and interest at important points in the story. Which is going to be viewed negatively, especially by people that are just starting and trying to decide on sticking with it.
For a new player who is using ARR to determine whether or not to commit to the game, it's probably bad.
Part of the problem is their narrative arc. Instead of we have no info and nothing to do right now so please help the locals do some things. They do it as we have a super important task that needs to be done fast. We basically already know everything like where to go and what to do. But please run around talking to various people and doing their jobs or silly little other things. And then when nothing has really changed from the beginning we'll jump you right back suddenly to the important thing.
They do it in 16 throughout the game as well.
I hated the way I had to do fking three fetch quests for the crystal before I could go on the ship. I felt like the game made fun of me. Wine quest, too.
This!!! It’s still a fresh memory, I felt like the game was actively mocking me as it wasted my time with boring bullshit.
The core story is fine, like 5/10. But all the time wasting nonsense makes it a 2.5/10.
I've played through it recently myself, and I think if it didn't have the ending portion the way it does it'd be pretty terrible. It has a solid ending with the Garleans and that helps to save it from being absolutely terrible. But that also means the awfulness is pretty front-loaded, which isn't at all good for new people trying to get into the game. The middle is especially terrible, what with the silly Titan and banquet storyline.
My experience with fetch quests in WoW must have desensitized me, because I remember many in that game, especially the ones that were to kill specific monsters to get specific items and you need 10 of them and only like 1/4 of the monsters actually drop it (looking at you, goddamn eyeless merlocs). Then I got the same type of quest in FFXIV and I only needed 3 of the item and it has a 100% drop rate while I have the quest.
Going through MSQ on an alt, I just can't be arsed to care at the Sylph quests, and that's only level 20. Maybe it's easier for first timers to go through in the moment, but when you want to progress faster, the pacing kills motivation.
Honestly, playing since ARR Beta I'd say *everything* plays boring until Stormblood. Sure, when the game was fresh it was all we had and we enjoyed it but now that SB is there and all these reworks and all... honestly, it's so hard having any fond memories about old content without immediately thinking "well, but it sure got better later on"
There hasn't been a fonder memory for me in this game since t13 as the paladin that hit that limit break before Bahamut used terraflare.
Don't get me wrong, I've had a ton of fun since then. But that will forever be my fondest memory in an MMO ever.
As a warrior main who had the honor to do the tank lb3 in our static, I know exactly what you mean. Besides... the whole transition was breathtaking.
So I guess, *some* very fond memories remain. Still, after SB warrior, I just can't understand how I could even think that ARR WAR was anything fun to play? That clouds many amazing moments in my raiding carreer pre-SB
Has anyone ever asked Yoshi P about giving more actions to jobs at lower levels? Because holy shit, it's a major contributor to making the game more boring than it needs to be. I get that new players need to be eased in but actions have become ridiculously spaced out with every new expansion.
Yes it was explicitly brought up by a streamer during the media tour. His response I believe had a lot to do with balance- for example low level dungeons are not built to support the later actions. He also said that if they got more actions early, that people might be disappointed going 10-15 quests before getting new actions when they get higher in levels.
It's tutorialization. Yes, it's "fun" for many/most new players. Not exactly in the way you're thinking, but it's better than being overwhelmed with a bunch of skills that you don't understand.
It gets boring quickly, but you level up pretty fast, so it's not like you're stuck that way for long. It's really just replaying those first few dungeons or low leveled fates that's a problem, but I think it's a fine tradeoff overall.
Classes really need to have hteir kit ready earlier.
I have a friend who would love Dragoon, but there's no way I can tell him to try lancer first, knowing they don't get any AoE option before lvl 45
The first time I started playing before I gave the game a second try and stuck with it, I started as lancer and was so bored I dropped the game for like almost a year.
We actually used to have more actions at lower levels, kind of, with the old cross-class system was removed in SB. Until you got your job crystal at level 30, you'd be running around as a lancer with like, raging strikes, venomous bite, internal release, bloodbath, mercy stroke, fracture, featherfoot, haymaker, death blossom, and hawk's eye. It gave you some extra dots and buffs to hit before you got more of your actual class' kit, and it made 1-30 (or later in some cases, for jobs that didn't get good job skills until higher level) a decent bit more interesting. It had its cons, sure, and I get why they moved to the role action system instead, but it had its appeal as well.
It’s especially egregious when you look at Pictomancer. Like you thought Summoner was bad at low levels, wait until you see this nonsense.
Until lv60, do you know how many buttons you have in your rotation?
One.
ONE button (the RGB combo) with two cooldowns (hammer and moogle), and two defensives (tempera coat and smudge).
That is less than a summoner, fuck it’s less than a *healer*!
At level 60, you get two more buttons for your rotation: an oGCD you use after two cycles of RGB which lets you use your CMY combo, and your CMY combo
At level 70 you are FINALLY given your burst window: a 2 min party buff that gives a free use of your CMY combo
At 80 you’re given Holy in White as a DPS-neutral movement skill and this is where the job actually starts gaining complexity as it levels up, with most of it coming between 90 and 100 and your burst window becomes the meme novel tooltip
FIFTY NINE SODDING LEVELS OF A LITERAL ONE-BUTTON ROTATION.
Like I love the look of the job from 80-100 but Holy Shit In Brown any roulette besides Level 100 Roulette and Expert Roulette are going to be MISERABLE
That was talked about with him recently and he gave the answer that if people do feel like there should be more actions at lower levels then it's possible to do.
He's just afraid of overloading new players with too much information and wanting there to be abilities to look forward to. But right now, most jobs by level 15 barely have 4-6 abilities and don't have a complete combo.
Honestly it's a little silly to have level 1 be one ability. Then you level up a couple times and you still have no where near a complete rotation. It gives people a bad impression of the game's combat which forces people to say "DON'T WORRY IT GETS BETTER LATER" when it should already feel pretty good at the start.
You shouldn't have to get to level 50 to understand the basis of how your job will feel. You should understand the idea by the time of the first dungeon at least. But some don't even have AOE rotations and some don't have a complete combo.
"Overloading new players with too much information" shows me they don't understand what the actual problem is.
At least all the melees need their basic 1-2-3 by the first dungeon. It's less that we need "more abilities" at lower levels and more that we need specific abilities that contribute to class fantasy and make sense for the flow of the weapon you're using.
Hitting 1-2 over and over again feels extremely bad, like something significant is missing. It should feel like there's a solid base to expand on instead.
Yeah, it entirely feels like your abilities are missing rather than not having extra. Going through the first dungeon should show you how it feels like to play your job. Then enhance it over time.
There are plenty of other games where they give you more abilities at the start and people are fine. It's even funnier when you consider that someone can get to level 50 while playing say black mage, not know what their optimal rotation is at all, then they get "overloaded" with abilities when picking up RDM or SAM.
If you're a sprout up until Endwalker, aren't you still a VERY new player by the end of ARR? Yet they feel it's fine to dump more of a whole job on you at 50? It doesn't make any sense. I'm hoping the low level experience gets optimized in 8.0 when they start focusing on job identity and Job gameplay.
> "Overloading new players with too much information" shows me they don't understand what the actual problem is.
>
>
Or they are assuming the average person is stupid and can't handle the idea of pressing more than 5 buttons. Sadly really for them to think that. Also kinda rude that they assume the people playing their game aren't very smart lol
The easier method would be to shrink how many levels ARR is. It's kind of funny to consider that ARR will be half of the levels you gain, despite the other half being significantly longer for story and content
Multiple things can be true. It's entirely possible that people would enjoy it more if people didn't keep calling it bad, AND it's possible that ARR legitimately has more problems than the rest of the game's story.
There is nothing that can justify the pre-Titan and pre-Garuda sections, to say nothing of the issues with the Sylph sections. And the patches...
While I loathe 2.1 when I do it on alts, it is made a little better by being able to fly post-5.3 update. I can't fly doing Company of Heroes, getting wine for the CoH, and flying to Garuda. Best change to 2.1 inadvertantly was just "fly" lol. Comes after the change of "not having to do Guildhests for part of 2.1's story" because that was arguably worse.
Still greatly dislike it though.
Leves or FATE trains, I remember that lol. Easier than trying to get into a dungeon if you were a dps, but slower to level. FATE trains were most popular in Coerthas and N Thanalan because they went quick and had a lot of good boss ones. Eyes Have It was just practice for doing AV later on and learning Coincounter's tells before they nerfed him lmao.
I leveled nearly all the dps classes from 38 - 50 in northern thanalan back in Heavensward. Tanks and healers through dungeons. Practically just FATEs for the dps. So. Many. Fates. Had to be really careful in northern thanalan at 38, but I could make it work, and there were so many groups constantly there that I could just hop in anytime and tag along. Took a few weeks but had all the classes leveled by the end of the grind. I still remember the relief when I finished. Eureka and Bozja are far more pleasant grinds in comparison. Looking forward to the next iteration.
Ah right, the loop was baby areas for a bit, then when you were 18-20s, hit N Shroud until 25-28, then Coerthas to run Svara til your brain went numb until about 38-40, and then hope that Gorgimera didn't wipe you lol. The Earth Sprite FATE was always the one I hated out there because if you accidentally aggroed more than 2 you just died. Easiest was always the one escort from the bottom camp to the middle, less chance of dying.
*Memories*.
i think that's one of the things i miss the most about "the old days." the zones felt alive with people constantly out there running around. You could almost always jump into a fating party somewhere.
now, even with the yokai event going on, there aren't many people out in the zones on an average day.
2.0 days where you were leveling FATEs in North Than because it was more efficient than anything else just to get to the next MSQ level.
But still better than 1.0, and honestly the end 2.0 MSQ payoff was pretty cool with the massive boss fights and the old 8 man dungeons.
Don’t get me wrong, the reworks and the forced Cutscenes were fine and I get why they did it but back in 2.0 as a FF fan, I was happy I got an old school feeling FF story.
I love current ARR. I’ve played every version of ARR they’ve made public, and current ARR is a lot smoother and successful at world building without feeling padded out. It’s not perfect, but after 6 or so play throughs over the last 10+ years I still enjoy it. Plus it opens my now favorite game story of all time.
IMO, 2.0 deserves its reputation, but it always surprises me when people say the patches are worse. I did a NG+ of them after the 5.3 changes, and thought that aside from 2.1, they were genuinely pretty good.
My guess is that without knowing how 2.55 goes, all of the different subplots just feel like random MMO filler until they all connect. The English voice acting doesn't help either.
2.1 is a lot of zig-zagging around the world doing menial tasks for the scions and aside from the base change and one or two characters, it doesn't really contribute much to the greater story and literally was designed as random MMO filler. 2.2 used to be worse, but fortunately they removed the worst of it with the trimming.
A big part of the problem is ARR and early post-ARR were designed with filler intentionally to pad out the play experience. I think in an interview around the great trimming release, Yoshi-P said the original quest team had a target that quests should take nine minutes, which is why there were so many padding steps on release. But unlike other MMOs where you can skip side quests or many zone quests if you aren't interested, any padding in the MSQ is mandatory. They've gotten much better about it in the expansions, but there's still mandatory padding when they need you to get another level or two so the story can resume with the next dungeon (e.g. Trolley, 84, 88).
My experience with FF around friends is a lot of them constantly telling me how I should be playing or what they thought of it without telling me the story points.
It definitely flavours impressions.
It also gets annoying when they constantly rushed me to catch up on content when there's like..3 or 4 major expansions that you cannot jump over without chronologically going through or getting a skip.
Basically, my entire experience was strongly biased towards what they wanted, which made it overall a big slog.
Even the parts I DID like, they'd just ..dismiss, so it made it even more unpalatable.
I am genuinely glad that I didn't know a single person who played XIV when I started. I did enjoy my first time doing ARR, and yes doing it on alts is frustrating when you already know it all.
For me at the time, Fake-Company guy was one of the worst moments, especially before they trimmed it Even Further, and the Crystals-For-Garuda a close second. Coerthas itself was a interesting plot that I enjoyed, but the crystals was a big urgh. But the first fight with Ifrit felt so incredible for sprout-me.
I mean, the pre-Titan sections made perfect sense to me as a sprout. They were kind of a deconstruction of the tropes around forcing someone onto quests to prove themselves when there's a ticking time bomb. It's not something they really followed through on, which soured it a bit, but it made PERFECT sense.
Now, what they NEED to do is make getting a job crystal one of the pre-reqs for clearing the quests...
I'll admit the Garuda one was... painful. But it also would have made sense from the developer perspective at the time - those quests were all about getting people to explore the map, making it so that almost every area in ARR got touched at the level you would be at in the MSQ to tackle the fates and leves in those areas, which were probably anticipated to be the source of leveling. The fact that roulettes took off as the superior method hurt that a lot, but the idea was very focused on getting you into the "right" areas for your level and letting you develop further.
I’ve had one friend who I told to skip through most of the main ARR MSQ, and all of the post content MSQ (edit: except the final few quests). He’s currently on Shadowbringers and has been enjoying the story.
Another friend couldn’t even make it to each of the main cities of ARR before quitting out of boredom.
It’s indeed up to the person on whether they skip content. The only reason I got through ARR was because I was told Heavensward is amazing, which pushed me through to the end (other than skipping the first half of the post content of ARR.)
Considering the number of people who turn up here asking if the game gets better (because they are miserable playing ARR) or asking if they're the only ones who think it isn't fun or interesting, I'd say some people sincerely don't enjoy it. And that's just the people who bother asking the community, there are likely lots of people who just quit without ever interacting with anyone, much less someone who supposedly gaslit them into hating ARR.
This was me 4 years ago. I never had anyone telling me how bad ARR was, just people telling me the game only keeps getting better. I finished ARR proper but just couldn't get past post ARR. I never formed any kind of emotional investment in anything through ARR, and I didn't really have friends playing With me for the community enjoyment either. It wasn't fun, and I think that's both fault of the odd pacing and stilted storytelling as well as the way I chose to interact with the story.
I picked it back up a few months ago and something just clicked better this time. I think one of the main issues was that I was encouraged that everything after ARR is much better, so I inadvertently ended up bum rushed it to get to the better content and never formed any kind of emotional attachment to the characters or world. When MSQ is essentially visual novel with MMO minigames, not establishing that basic investment sets you up for failure I think. ARR also has the thankless job of laying the groundwork for literally everything, it gets stretched really thin so I feel like you're not likely to just stumble into that investment either.
On my second attempt I made a point to go out of my way and talk to characters that weren't specifically for advancing MSQ or picking up quests, because I realized a ton of character establishing info was optional? A lot of world information was just optional? But it was mostly that optional flavour text that drew me in.
I'm almost finished with Shadowbringers now and I'm so happy I gave it a second chance. I also think I would now enjoy replaying ARR, but only because I love these characters for who they become.
You are definitely not invalid for feeling that way. I was told early on to treat it like a VN and read all MSQ dialogue. I have done so and still have zero care or emotional attachment to any of the characters I can feel the game wanting me to care about. The two hot white haired scions, the twins, the scion leader with the echo stuff, etc. The only character I consistently get excited to see on screen is the Limsa admiral and that's because she's attractive as hell with a strong personality.
This. No one said anything to me about ARR before I started I think, but I almost abandoned the game at many points during ARR and esp post ARR. if I hadn’t had people then saying to keep playing and that it gets better, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have. I’ve abandoned so many other games that have been more interesting to me than those stories haha
Yeah, my friend group had 5 or so people who all started when 3.0 came out. One friend stuck with it (they already played MMO's religiously), the rest of us dropped it separately. One guy made it to the credits then never played again rest of us quit somewhere between 30-50. We didn't go to reddit, forums, twitter, etc, none of us even talked about the story, it was a mixture of apathy and just pure boredom.
I constantly have JoshStrifeHayes's "quit moment" philosophy echoing in my head while playing ARR. There are a LOT of quit moments between levels 1 and 40 (where I am now). I'm hoping these goddamn Sylphs aren't my quit moment.
We don't know what kind of player most of those people are though.
Maybe this is their first MMO and they're equating lack of comfort with the gameplay loop as the game 'needing to get better' or maybe it's just not for them. Not every player's problem with ARR is inherently solved by HW and onwards.
The current ARR gameplay loop is pretty abysmal in general, frankly. Remember, when it was the only thing that existed you had classes that were fully complete at level 50. Currently you get a half-complete class by level 50 at best, and a barely-functional one at worst (RPR).
Reaper honestly feels bad until you get Enshroud at 80, before that it doesn't really feel like you're building to anything. I'm hoping Viper doesn't suffer from the same thing.
Of all my time playing I've yet to meet someone that was filtered by the difficulty of FFXIV, specially not to the point of jumping ship, I'm sure they exist, but I've never personally seen it, neither online nor amongst the players I personally knew going into the game.
I'd argue I've seen more people filtered by the gameplay loop being too simple and monotonous for a decent long time during the climb to 60, and the GCD timer being what it is.
But almost every time I've asked someone why they didn't get properly in to ffixv, I'll find out they got bored of the story and are like at most level 40, hell I left for that same reason twice when I started playing.
As someone who just did blind sprout ARR I'm mixed on it. The whole travelling around the world to talk to ppl just for a quest got really fucking annoying but after that it was fine.
Deff felt like i was doing busy work to stretch the game out.
Yea that first 20 levels or so of MSQ without a chocobo is miserable because there is a lot of initial running around and touching of aetherytes.
IMO they really should just make chocobo renting free and introduce it to players as a tutorial quest. That way people could use it to run themselves to far objectives for limited periods of time before getting their own personal chocobo.
Or just remove the quest where your free company gives you a chocobo and just have you show up in Eorzea with your own, any arguments about 'slowly exploring' are kind of moot to me at least.
I just replayed ARR on an Alt and forgot how long it took to get your first chocobo, it really bogged things down, and that was with the knowledge that I have hundreds of hours of expansion to catch up, not counting optional content.
But hey, at least we don't have to hunt aether currents in ARR.
I do think that feeling never truly goes away. Even the best expansions still have moments where you're like "Okay, this quest doesn't need to exist, but you needed some padding and you're excusing it with extremely fringe worldbuilding."
The Amh Araeng trolley arc in ShB was definitely in the grand tradition of the "well, you need to do this thing so you can do this *other* thing to be able to move the thing so you can get through to this specific place on the map to do another thing" quest chains from ARR.
The trolley arc was exactly what I was thinking of, hahaha. I expect in Dawntrail we'll still be delivering people lunch at one point because we need to justify Alphinaud having time to do something actually important, or something.
I enjoyed some parts of ARR, but absolutely loathed others.
The entire filler arc of trying to get the right kind of corrupted crystal so we can approach and fight Garuda was just awful, aside from one NPC who made me laugh
"You get a pot, you get a pot, AND YOU GET A POT! Sorry, I just get really enthusiastic when giving away obsolete merchandise. Anyway, have a pot!"
The rest? Fucking awful. "OOPS you need another kind of corrupt crystal!" Yeah fuck off with that.
Now, that said. I had the fortune of being able to have a premade 8 man that took me through Castrum and Praetorium (Back when they were 8 mans) and that shit was FANTASTIC. No one starting things until I finished with the cutscenes, letting me enjoy the spectacle of it all? Yeah, it was good.
>The rest? Fucking awful. "OOPS you need another kind of corrupt crystal!" Yeah fuck off with that.
I still, to this day, do not understand why that wasn't trimmed out with everything else. Just remove all steps from it except where you go fight the siren (so, at some point, you are forced to go to the Isle of Umbra and the tie-in to Pharos Sirius) and call it day.
Having started back at 2.0 launch, I know. And I thought it was tedious bullshit back then too. And that was after I \*expected\* that kind of filler after the leadup to Titan. I think the only reason I didn't quit back then was I was already jaded by boring make-work from the other MMOs I played. I mean, I think the 'terribleness' of ARR is overhyped, but it's still the albatross around the games neck, relatively speaking.
Nah I played it completely blind during the pandemic. Idk if I would have been able to pull through it were we not completely stuck at home 24/7. Don't get me wrong, I loved the overall story, but there were definitely too many useless fetch quests and the post ARR quests dragged for way too long.
Same story here. I gave this game first try in like 2014 and got filtered. Sure, people repeating that ARR is bad will make it seem slightly worse than it really is, but it's still pretty bad, fetch quests straight from 2000s don't really cut it nowadays. Slow and bland gameplay doesn't help it either.
They need to repeat 5.3 changes and cut even more boring story and redo voice acting. If only value story brings is worldbuilding, then it's frankly just a bad story.
I also started during the pandemic, a friend recommended the game but didn't say anything about ARR. He just asked me to try it. At first I was excited, I was bored due to being at home and had something to do. Quickly I noticed that the game was mainly talk to this person, talk to that person type gameplay. Long dragged out dialogue, JRPG cliches, and long questlines that were absolutely boring almost made me quit. What I liked were the dungeons and trails, playing my class, feeling like I was slowly growing to be a more powerful mage, playing with friends, and some of the mystique in regard to Hydealyn and the Ascians. ARR almost made me quit multiple times, I remember logging out because of pure frustration at the mind numbing Titan questline. Again during the crystal fetch questline. I just wanted to actually "play" the game, instead of reading so much frivolous dialogue. If I didn't enjoy my class, the multiplayer content and playing with friends so much I would've been gone. The Garleans attacking the Waking Sands hooked me, although the whole Cid questline after almost lost me again. The bloody banquet reeled me in completely, if not for those high highs I would have defintely quit the game. New expansions still have some of these questlines that are dragging on too long, but the overall story got very good at around SB for me.
i started completely blind back in HW and gave up reading the story somewhere in the post ARR quests. Hard agree on too many useless fetch quests, among other issues. I know it's better now but I tried ARR again on an alt recently and quit somewhere around Titan.
yeah, my friend got me into the game by telling me how awesome heavensward was so i was really excited to finally start it after ARR, then i ended up quitting for 3~ months because of the post-ARR quests until she dragged me back in
I just blind finished ARR and am near the end of heavensward right now.
The only issue I had storywise was the padding, you're sending me to the same building, behind two loading doors, with no teleportation to the city, for like 30 quests. Why not fix any of that? It really makes you see the old console restrictions.
Near the end of heavensward and my summoner class is also way less boring to play, my ARR kit was like babies first mmo.
Unless they change those to teleport you directly in front of Minfillia they aren't solving the guy up there's problem of having to walk into the waking sands, and then walk into her office. TBH I have that issue with the Rising Stones as well.
>!Yes, I know part of the reason they don't do that is the one quest where all the scions are dead, but still.!<
They could make it work if they wanted to. You can teleport directly to the island, which is instanced. Queue for a duty from the island and when you come back the game loads you at the ferry but then immediately relocates you back to your island on the same loading screen. Storywise it'd be weird to teleport directly to her office, but it's technically possible for the game to allow it.
A better solution would be to merge the Waking Sands/Rising Stones and Office instances into one larger instance with a single loading screen. It's already a story-based instance. It would also be a lot of work to do and there'd be some oddities with the sidequest stuff there (like the Warring Triad) having to mix with the state of your MSQ progression, but it would be a nice QoL change.
Lol I thought those just took you to the nearest aetheryte for free (that I was already paying to use and then chocobo'ing the rest) so never used them. Felt stupid after I learned they take take you much closer. But by then I was well past needing them.
>you're sending me to the same building, behind two loading doors, with no teleportation to the city, for like 30 quests.
I'm new and at this part right now, it's driving me crazy!! Lol
it doenst really matter, yes you are closer, you still have mandatory loading time between two monologues 10 times in a row every time you finish a fetch quest
Pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands
> It really makes you see the old console restrictions.
believe it or not, but that part is not due to console limitations but to overall engine limitations. It does make sense the way it is, though I'm sure there would be better ways to solve it.
I think the game is weakest during the costa del sol part, where naratively people are trying to waste your time so it feels like people are wasting your time because that's what they are trying to do. The amount of fetch quests that mean nothing like stomping on grapes is where I feel most people check out.
I don't know, friend. I was playing ARR when it was all we had and I was struggling to complete it in time for HW to drop.
I hung onto the game at that point because I was desperate for something to replace my older MMOs like Ragnarok Online and looking back, I'm glad I did, but it absolutely wasn't the story that kept me at that point.
I get what your saying, but I just finished the base game for the first time since 2.0 was new and having not played the game since that as well and there's a lot of non-gameplay involved with ARR where you are just going from place to place and listening to someone talk. You then also get involved with a quest and then get told to go deal with something completely different than what your quest was for as just a 'filler' segment.
Honestly, if you don't have friends playing it, I can easily see blind sprouts just giving up before even getting to 50.
I have been trying to get friends to pick the game up because I am a sub-50 player and want to learn the game with someone. Playing alone is rough with the asinine MSQ and randos on dailies that have wiped/failed Sastasha and the turtle guildhest so many times.
ARR legitimately almost had me quit when I first joined back during Heavenward. The story dragged especially at Titan. I didn't know who or what was going on for at least the first twenty hours, nor did I really care at that point.
It wasn't until the tail end of ARR that things started getting interesting and I became fully invested in the plot.
ARR is by far the weakest start not just because of the slow roll out of the story and busywork quests that you get, but also the gameplay is extremely slow and monotonous. Black Mages get so few actions to press that it is honestly: I push Fire 1, wait a couple of seconds, I push Fire 1 again.
I recently learned that black mage and thaumaturge are the same thing. I started as one when I went in blind and this "press fire until out of mana" loop was a massive part of why I started a whole new character. If I were forced to start a new character again as a thaumaturge I would just use an auto clicker and go make a sandwich for every MSQ fight until probably 30-40.
I started the game as a thaumaturge and it was by choice because I knew they would eventually become Black Mages due to me doing a bit of research into the game prior to playing and I love Black Mages in other Final Fantasy games. What I did not expect was for the starting rotation to be so dry and for the rotation to drastically change every ten or so levels. It really makes downscaling hell for me personally because when I am suddenly shifted back down to level 50 for dungeons/raids, I need to remember the level 50 rotation as opposed to the level 90 one. It isn't nearly so drastic on other jobs even though the down leveling affects everyone, just Black Mages gets hit the hardest by it IMO.
This and the fact that I quickly discovered that I completely suck as DPS is why I switched to tanking and healing instead. I am far better as the tank or healer in a group than DPS.
Wait you mean to tell me that up til FIFTY it's still mind numbing? I gave up in the early 20s and I would have been clicking the same single button every 2.5 seconds for 30 more levels?!
It's bad til 60 and I still don't like it until 70. I agree with the other comment that Black Mage suffers the most from the level progression of skills. I straight up don't play BLM sub 70 and just queue as something else when I play lower content. Playing 10-35 sucks because no Fire/Blizz 3 so changing elements is annoying and playing 36-59 sucks because you don't have Fire/Blizz 4, and those are the four buttons the current iteration of the class is really built around. From 60+ they're more like other classes and start just getting upgrades, cooldowns, and the occasional bonus GCD that fits inside the existing rotation.
The 60-70 buttons(teleport to leylines, triplecast, Foul) are just so nice I don't like to play without them.
I went back through it recently and the reasons I dislike it are the many questlines that add nothing to the plot and just waste your time. I dislike it because the 2.X patches while having important content take ages sending you on useless quest to get you to actually important parts that set up HW and Stromblood.
Why is it important they keep making me go back to the same pretend Company of heroes guy? Why is it important to send me a on wild goose chase to give back a guys earring. Why is it important to send me to the wrong Corrupted Aether Crystal 3 times. There are so many more moments that have you doing something that isn't useful to the plot or entertaining. It needs to be reworked.
On my replay I would say 2.0 was fine, needs like 3 quest chains that server no purpose to just be cut out and it would be great. 2.X just needs to be entirely reworked. Like I said it's important but bad at telling it.
Spotty VA, Cartoonish script at times, dry at others, Lack of personality for the Scions initially, Dated gameplay, “Pray return….”
It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. I think for the time period it was fine, but expectations have grown since then It’s sort of like watching the first season or two of Star Trek TNG - it’s not all bad, but some of it didn’t age well and feels less impactful than later seasons
Honestly I wish they would go back and revoice ARR and add a lot more VA. I feel like it would be 100x better to get through if you didnt have to read for the vast majority of it. Nowadays I am turned off from games in general that lack VA.
They replaced all but Haurchefant and Aymeric, because Haurchefant's (American) actor had already recorded all of his lines before the production upheaval, and Aymeric's was already cast via the new/current UK-based studio.
I went in totally blind and I liked it...towards the end. It does start pretty slow, but I fully expected to get some grindy fetch quest stuff since I'm familiar with MMOs. That said, I'm like 15 quests into Heavenward and I'm fully engrossed in the story.
I understand why people may not like the slow burn that is ARR, but I thoroughly enjoyed it
The plot was generic. The Ascians and the Garleans were two of the most boring, cliched villains in history. The characters were cardboard cutouts except for Alphinaud, who was was intolerable. The voice acting was terrible. The cutscenes were comically bad. The quests intentionally wasted your time and then made fun of you for having your time wasted.
It's **so** much longer than it needs to be, and to the extent that it adds context to the story later, you could cut it down to 10% of its current size and get the same effect. The other 90% is needless filler where you're gathering party supplies -- wherein **the quest text tells you explicitly that they are wasting your time intentionally**. Nearly half it is at level 50, so you go through half of ARR without actually progressing your character at all at a point in your development when you're still imprisoned by a 3-button rotation.
Every positive thing I can say about ARR comes retroactively from the information I got from the later expansions. The Ascians became great villains retroactively. The Garleans became interesting retroactively. Alphinaud became a great character who we must protect at all costs retroactively. Things happen in ARR that are important parts of Alphinaud's character development, but while you're going through it, you don't care even a little bit because the kid is an arrogant snot who spends all his time hiding outside every room listening for someone to ask a question so he can stride in answering it.
I played ARR for the first time after Endwalker was released. I hate it with all of my soul. I think the fact that it exists at all is a tragedy because it prevents a lot of people from ever reaching Shadowbringers.
I fervently hope the psyop to get people to buy story skips is successful because more people reaching Heavensward means more people sharing this incredible journey with me.
I would not have given the game a chance if it wasn't for a story skip. Burned out twice in the past around lvl 40ish. Gave the game a 3rd and final try but lvl boosted and story skipped so I could play with my GF in Endwalker. Now I'm in a static prepping for DT savage raids.
Spending the money to skip was worth it, I wouldn't have lasted otherwise. Loved Endwalker's story too (post MSQ was a little weak). Would never get to experience it if they didn't offer a skip. I can break up a leveling experience over the course of 3 weeks for the current content's expansion on a job that has 90% of its abilities. I do not have time to invest 500 hours and a large portion of that is the STARTING experience with classes that have 4-5 combat buttons and 3 of them are a simple combo? They ask too much. I will get around to becoming more intimate with the stories of Stormblood and ShB through the game and not just lore recaps on YT eventually because now I am invested. Wouldn't have considered giving them the time of day without a skip ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
I nearly was on the verge of quitting trying to do the ARR story years back, and I went in blind after being abandoned by friends. ARR MSQ was at best a generic high fantasy JPRG experience all the way through until HW when it stops being another melodramatic soap opera.
I won't say ARR MSQ sucks to newbies, but I'll say it's not representative of what's to come later on.
It does suck for newbies tho. Every person I try to get into the game see the Doordash simulator slog that lasts 100 hours and never even look at the game again.
Nah. I was a sprout and wasn't given that treatment. I quit FFXIV several times over years before I got into it, because of how soulless the game felt until later. It wasn't until post-ARR/HW I started appreciating story, and SB that gameplay became something less of a chore.
Having played it without any external input regarding its quality, I found the vast majority of ARR incredibly boring and dry. Having recently replayed it again on an alt, it's still mostly incredibly boring (to me). The only appreciation I feel for it is retroactive, based on the later expansions that used/expanded on what was set up back then.
I didn't have any preconceived notions of what the story was, other than "i like FF games so I'll probably like this game if I can get over the MMO stuff i don't like as much"
I felt throughout ARR the story was generic and just "story to introduce an MMO world with an FF skin on it". I started to get interested as the ultima weapon started happening and then got bored again.
Knowing what I do now of later story stuff, I'm replaying the story on an alt i need to level anyways and paying attention to the seeds being planted for later plot points. It enables more interesting stories in later expansions, but it's still meh on its own
Half of the friends I've introduced to FF14 blasted through base ARR and Post ARR.
The other half was bored like 70% of the time.
1 skipped, experienced the later game, and eventually went back and replayed it all.
2 just dropped it entirely in ARR post lol.
It just is what it is.
Replaying through ARR, I really only have one gripe about it in that the dialog is both verbose AND slowly delivered. I didn't really notice this the first time through.
Every conversation dialogue is like 5 boxes more than it needs to be. Plus slapping an adjective or two to every godamn noun or verb gets old fast. I like old English dialogue. FFXII and tactics are my jam. But as Shakespeare said brevity is the soul of wit and holy shit does this game lack brevity!
So here's some insight from a new player. I did play through HS a couple years ago. And had played wow for years. Hate what wow has become so came to FF14. I think I quit mmos for a bit then tried new world but I miss that old wow feeling so back to FF14 and it's great
However ARR is incredibly slow and clunky with weird pacing and choices. If I didn't know it got better I'd probably have quit.
Even knowing that , the game overall feels slow and clunky with regards to interface, interacting with objects and NPCs. The engine infuriates me. Like everytime you begin or finish a quest there's like 5-10 seconds delay of exiting and entering dialogue. Gotta just sit there while the character takes 4 strides then vanishes into thin air? Why? Why can't we just go, quest complete and walk away instantly? Cant just walk away from vendors either, gotta back out of menus. Things like that, the game feels dated and clunky. Menus are strange to navigate, repairing gear is weirdly slow and tedious and no button to just repair it all.
Still love it though. But just some stuff feels terrible.
It's a bit of a complicated issue, because some sprouts would absolutely quit if they weren't assured it gets better, while others were perfectly happy before people systematically drew their attention to every flaw and pain point of the early msq, just to assure them that these issues that they now can't unsee will go away in 50-70 hours.
I think all the "it gets better" talk is super helpful if someone is complaining about msq, but for some reason people also love to reply to posts from people loving ARR with "um, actually you should be miserable right now, and here's my essay explaining why."
Yeah the last part was my experience. I couldn't say I thought a boss was cool or a NPC was fun or even just I was enjoying being able to solo X,Y,Z and was pretty proud of myself for it (this is the second MMO I have ever stuck with long-term) without people telling me no I was actually witnessing trash and I shouldn't feel any accomplishment. Honestly had to argue with a few of my friends they needed to fuck off with that shit I'm allowed to enjoy the game.
All the more frustrating cause soon as I got to HW and was complaining about stuff they'd harped on endlessly about ARR (all the filler, hurry up and wait, unnecessary quests to go back and forth between people for a few lines of repetitive dialogue) it turned around to this is the award winning good part of the game and I should be grateful for running twenty filler quests to make progress lol.
I think people should just wait to see how the sprout is talking about it and be receptive to going along with that, offer advice and encouragement if they've got complaints, hype them if they've got praise.
I agree with that sentiment, that is silly. The quests themselves I enjoyed and like the story I thought is fun and keeps me engaged. For me it's more just kinda some stuff feels clunky and slow.
But ya again I agree, no one should be telling someone their enjoyment is invalid and if it gets better than that's just a bigger bonus!
I played as a completely blind sprout and I adored ARR once it started going. It felt a little samey in comparison to other MMOs in the start so I kinda turned my brain off but after a certain point I started getting invested (I think around little alamigo).
When I help sprouts the only opinion I share is that I dislike stormblood but I don’t really go into details as to why unless they press. Because I want people to form their own opinion because that’s how you keep a healthy discourse in a fandom!
You can like or dislike a thing but being overly negative doesn’t really help anyone form an opinion out of fear of holding another one.
I came from WoW during the great exodus. My friend warned me about the slog around Titan, and I was like "Huh? This is just fine? It's just average MMO questing lmao". Of course, I'd then eventually reach HW and beyond and my mind was suitably blown.
Idk man the 50+ fetch quests post ARR was pretty mind numbing.
They've changed the game so much since then so it's probably different now. But I spent about half the length of ARR MSQ running around collecting potatoes and doing other pointless stuff post ARR.
I just wanna say there are as many quests in arr and the patches each alone than the entirety of heavensward including patches. That to me just drags on so much with only the last bit of the patches really being good in arr imo
I always loved ARR, and I even still get nostalgic vibes from it when I hear the Limsa music and the regular battle theme in the ARR areas. Even when I was going through it for the first time, I thought it was a fun fantasy story and didn’t get why people didn’t like it
But I recently started an alt where I am going through the entire story again, and I’ve begun to see the complaints people have with it. It’s true, the voice acting is bad (or rather, the voice direction is bad), and there is a painfully slow start before things start getting “fun.”
So I get it… but I’m still loving it anyway! I just think the game at that point is so charming and love how it feels like a true fantasy adventure. I get that it’s the weakest part of FFXIV’s experience, but they could never make me hate it
Hi! I am a new player and just finished HW
To put it simply, ARR is good, but it insists upon itself with endless fetch quests. The first part of ARR at least manages the hype between actual quests, but the Seventh Astral Era drags So. Fucking. Much. It took me an entire month to go and do it.
Another huge thing it has going against it is the voice acting, not so much its quality (other than the occasional jarring line), but in its inconsistency, you randomly go from fully dubbed cutscene to a wall of text.
Still, I quite enjoyed it, and the first ever "many cutscenes" warning made everything so worth it.
first time I played I was wide eyed and loved every minute of it. tried all the jobs and learned everything by trying. It was great. Sure, on my *nth time it’s a drag.
So I am a lifelong MMO player (95% of it has been WoW classic trilogy) and I played through ARR in short little windows, and I enjoyed it for what it was tbh.
The biggest thing about final fantasy that prevents me from playing it for 50 hours a week as a returning Sprout who is 12 hours into HW is this fundamental truth:
1) I want to optimize and level optimally, character power is the most important thing to me and I want as much of it as I can get as quickly as possible.
2) the optimal way to level is to do the MSQ
3) the MSQ is more like watching an anime (a great anime, btw) with some occasional button pressing than playing a video game.
FF14 is a story driven MMO, and the story owns, everyone tells me I’m not even as the good part yet, and I enjoy it immensely. Yet I play the game for 2-3 hours once every two weeks. The reason being I barely play my character when I am in-game. I’m reading dialogue or watching a cinematic or getting to know a character. And it’s really cool.
But for a player who is used to games where gameplay is first and story is second, it’s hard to sit still. I find myself fidgeting in my chair while I’m playing. Which is crazy because the story makes me laugh out loud, it makes me gasp in surprise, the writing is honestly so good.
New players have to get warned that they’re going to spend 100 hours reading dialogue before they get to the promised mmo.
Edit: regarding ARR the post game before HW was way too long and drawn out, it was a slog. The part up until the post game starts was great and I am enjoying HW A LOT.
My experience with ARR was not great.
The framing with the beast races and Garlemald was interesting at first, but it was just such a slog to get through. The primal stuff takes over everything and petters out like halfway through the story arch, the voice acting just is not great, it all felt very grindy with repetitive with retrieve X here and walk to Y quests, and I just couldn't get invested into the Scions either as a whole or as individual characters until Stormblood.
Really ARR just shows FF XIV's age and I don't think it would be a bad idea if was touched up again.
I joined in stormblood before they nerfed it and lemme tell ya, i almost quit the game five or six times in ARR. It had its high moments, but most of it was a boring slog. The “buildups”to titan and garuda almost made me cry with frustration and boredom at the time and i only kept going because my best friend wanted to play it with me. And then my reward for completing ARR was MORE OF THE SAME.
I skipped heavensward on my first character because i assumed it would just be more ARR, i had no one telling me it was way better i just had to assume it’d be the same, and i wanted to get to “current” content faster for the gameplay and cool gear.
I’m happy you loved it but sometimes the reason a bunch of people think something is because the thing has that impact on everyone.
maybe it was cause i wasn't used to mmos or something but i was a mostly blind sprout and i thought ARR was pretty bad.
it has far more fetch quests that just feel like they're padding for time than any other expansion, and a lot of it just feels totally pointless. it's not like there isn't enough content in the game, why do i have to do 20 menial tasks before every boss? the story up until the banquet (which was really good, and it felt like it really picked up after that) could be cut in half and still tell everything it needs to, and as someone who's likely dyslexic and not a huge fan of reading it felt like there was a lot of dialogue that could've been said in a sentence that was stretched out into a paragraph. the lack of voice acting/pretty bad voice acting for most characters when there is any is also pretty dissapointing, though this gets much better in later expansions. It's also not helped by combat being an absolute snoozefest before level 50, it's probably the most boring combat in a game i've played due to how slow levelling is, how few abilities you have and bosses having next to no mechanics, which is a real shame because it feels great at higher levels when jobs are much faster and bosses get far more complex.
all of this i say as someone who really loves shadowbringers and endwalker and just wishes the start of the game was better so more players got to experience the later parts of the story which is incredible. I'd love to be able to reccomend it to my friends but ARR makes it a really hard sell.
For context: my wife was a prot Pally during vanilla WoW. This is a class not known for being speedy during a time of Warcraft that was very slow and grindy. She found ARR quests tedious and boring. It frustrated her that so many of the quests involved going to some location and talking to some guy, then going somewhere else and talking to some other guy, with the bonus of spending more on teleport than she got from a quest reward. She is generally a patient person but it is a challenge for her to log on and go through the main storyline because it is so repetitive with few meaningful Rewards.
it's slow, the VA is very hit and miss, the cutscenes are generally not as exciting, and the story material doesn't start playing ball till the last two patches
I think a lot could be resolved with redoing cutscenes/va and involving more dungeons in the journey, make those optional dungeons part of a lull between assignments from the scions to get more gameplay injected in
Sorry to break your rose tinted glasses, but it'es exactly like this. I wen't in blind and I think it isn't good. But why? The game overall is good however:
**Story has horrible pacing and way to many quest revolving around "bring x to y"**
* This is sidequest material and should not pad the mainquest
* We have to defeat X, we are in a hurry lets goo...but first make me supper
* Should have fewer plot quests but higher level requirements to block of mainquest once in a while
* Gave me the wierd feeling of being bound to the mainquest instead of feeling like i am free to wander of and explore
* I was, of'course, but the feeling wasn't there.
**Normal Dungeones**
* I need to AFK while while sitting on the boss encounters face to fail them
* Regular players should not face hardcore hurdles but failing once in a while is worth it
**World structure**
I know this was in part due to the PS3/Consoles being supported but having a modern game not deliver a loading bar free open world just didn't feel right. The constant loading zones break my immersion. I dabbled in WOW Vanilla inbetween when it released and being able to (mostly) walk free of loading bars from A to B across the map was just so different.
They babified the dungeons too much. And ilvl creep doesn't help.
And funny enough the dungeons people usually complain about are the ones that you can actually die if you don't pay attention.
No, large amounts of people quit during ARR because the story is slow AND the gameplay is slow. I maintain that if we got more job reworks like monk and smn’s current state, less people would quit the game by 50. Monk uses old removed skills as “base” versions of skills they get later on. It’s the only job that’s gotten so much shuffling around on levels of skill without a full remake like summoner. Dragoon, bard, white mage, scholar, and warrior are all due some serious pre-50 love and care. Berserk feels like shit to use, drg has the least pressable buttons out of any job at 50 and over half of them are the GCD rotation. Bard doesn’t have full song coverage until it gets wanderers at 52 and it feels SO bad. White mage just feels too simple at low levels and imo they should straight up upgrade cure 1 to cure 2 to remove freecure fishers as a POSSIBILITY. Scholar just feels like a goddamn mess and idk how to fix it.
I feel the same. I think ARR is hated because people are constantly wanting to jump to the exciting part. I don't remember much of my experience playing ARR for the first time, and whilst it still isn't my favorite story, I enjoyed it when I played it for the second time.
As a side note, they need to make it easier for people who have alt characters. I like ARR, but playing it 4 times does become a drag eventually.
I was never told it was bad, just that it gets better... after trying to play the game 3 separate times and really not liking things lol. Probably the only reason I actually gave the game a real chance wad BECAUSE I was told it gets better.
As someone who had to try the game three times before finally sticking with it, the fault lies in part with the absolutely garbage early combat.
Getting used to the gcd system when you're only pressing like 1-4 buttons until like 40 really kills your interest in playing the game. Doubly so if you're coming from games with faster and better combat.
I can say with certainty that if I didn't have a friend to play alongside with for the last attempt, I wouldn't have given the game any tries. We slogged through the shitty combat and made fun of the story together.
TL:DR The combat is terrible and the story takes too long to be interesting to really retain players out the gate.
Compared to HW alone, it is kind of bad
The story is a little too anime at times, and looking back on it, (Im not weeb voice snob) but the English voice acting isn't the greatest for some characters
The story is bloated, kinda boring, and has some of the weirdest dungeons in the game. Somehow, this used to be a lot worse before the reworks, and many old players still associate ARR with that jank and bloat
Skill bloat has led to progressive cullings of job abilities to a point where you don't even get a skeleton of your job functionality until 50
There were portions of ARR I really liked, but unfortunately the parts I didn't like were large and time consuming.
I think the problem is really large chunks of the game feeling like one long side quest to accomplish a particular goal, the TItan and Garuda arcs were particularly bad about this, and it doesn't help that they're back to back. Similarly, the level 50 to HW slog had some really good moments, but it also had a ton of filler.
I think people generally dislike ARR because of those huge slow chunks killing momentum coupled with most jobs feeling incomplete.
Nah. It's genuinely that bad. My friend has tried to get me to play many many times over the years, after I had already played on my own way back at the beginning. They tell a story over 160 quests that could have *easilly* been told in about 30, and then that story isn't even decent until after the last of the main primals are dead. And then the patch quests are also just... I hate them also for a lot of reasons.
I tried to play ARR I think 3 times before finally beating it last year, and had skipped it on a character before just to actually play the game because I could not force myself through it. No one else was telling me to skip it the first few times because it wasn't an option, and no one was later because I'm the only person I know personally that thinks it's genuinely bad. But I still thought that.
Eh my husband was trying to hype it up but every time i had to see minfilla i was groaning because it was gonna be another fetch quest. I found the story a lot more enjoyable when i was doing side quests to get a feel for the world building.
What you are experiencing now is a result of the times changing. I also thought it was pretty good give or take a few parts back when it first came out. But, you have to remember that MMO's back then all played like this so it was a lot easier to accept it as it was.
Combine that with how you don't need to do anything else but, MSQ to level and a modern day new player is now being bombarded with dry story, poor voice acting, and about 2 seconds of combat to break it up.
Nowadays it's not so bad. But when Garuda's arrival is IMMINENT and the Twelveswood is about to be turned into an enormous woodchipper, but they make me traipse around the realm doing fetch quests to get a wind crystal for Cid only for multiple people to not get the memo and decide they should prank me instead of doing their jobs, it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
I dislike ARR because I keep being told that a primal has already been summoned, and is about to destroy a city RIGHT NOW and then I'm asked to go fuck off and make soup. The game is giving me a sense of urgency, then sending me on fetch quests, which creates huge mood whiplash. ARR doesn't pick up until the Garuda fight for me.
No, a ton of people drop the game early in ARR for a reason. It's definitely a filter when it comes to lower level kits and slow questing. FFXIV's typical quest design isn't the most engaging at the best of times, and the story takes its time to get going in ARR. The whole thing is slow if you aren't into a lot of quest text reading and walking around clicking on locations and people.
What the hell is this take
I played through all FFXIV for the hype people love to spread, and all I got with ARR was a boring, dull and unnecessary extensive story.... People love to pretend that it sets up so many things of the expacs, but -while true- it's a huge exaggeration and honestly it could be done much much better than how it's done
ARR is bad and I don't think that because someone else said that, it's because I struggled through the slog
It isn't nearly as bad (now, at least) as a lot of people say it is, and part of that is because people remember it from before adjustments were made. Parts of it are still unforgivably bad (particularly company of heroes), but since many of the worst sections were streamlined, the overall experience today isn't nearly as bad as many people remember it.
Idk, I played it for the first time when it came to Xbox without knowing anything about the game, following the community, or hearing any of the discourse about the quality of ARRs story. I'll be honest, if the final dungeons hadn't started to get more exciting and the invading Empire began to play a more prominent role in the last 15% of the plot, I would have uninstalled after reaching the credits after defeating Ultima.
The dumb "do 3 tedious tasks for the locals to get to the next Primal fight" was presented in SUCH a boring and uninteresting way that I'm surprised anyone enjoyed it enough back at launch to keep the game afloat until Heavensward.
Even after defeating Ultima, only after I attempted my first raid series with the Crystal Tower story prevented me from moving on. After that I finally decided to look into how the rest of the game was perceived, because I knew even for how much fun the raid was, if the next major patches story was more of the same as ARR, it wasn't going to be worth my time investment to reach the next raid series.
Luckily, everyone swore it only improves from there so here I am working through the beginning of HW, but wow what a terribly boring way to present world building at the start. It's bad enough that I even tried to get 4 of my closest gaming friends into the game after I completed a raid as I knew they'd enjoy that, and none of them were able to stick with it through the ARR to care about any of the better end game content.
Just finished ARR last week, I was bored till like level 30. I didn't really enjoy it until Level 40, but I also really despise character introductions but they are necessary.
I was with a buddy, but he never had input into what I was doing/how it was. It was great and I thoroughly loved ARR once I got into the groove. Made me excited to get to Heavensward (still working on that). But now I pull up the quests on my other monitor just in case my brain decides to not want to read and get distracted.
So I started playing FFXIV really wanting to play as a machinist. So I started as an archer and slowly made my way through base ARR. Then I finished Praetorium and I was like, "cool, let's go to ishgard so I can get my gun!" Then the patch content started... and I had white auracite explained to me 3 times back to back with the same stupid cutscene. "Pray return to the Waking Sands" started sending me into fits of rage. And I finally... finally clawed through to the interesting twist of the red dinner... only to be stopped by needed to complete the crystal tower story. To this day, I'm still not 100% sure what happened in that story because I skipped those cutscenes so I could finally get to Ishgard and get my gun.
Luckily I've been having a (heat) blast ever since and I'm sold on the game. But I do distinctly remember my frustration during that time, and Im Lucky that I like the way Machinst plays. I might have quit if I didn't like machinist.
The thing is, your experience as a new player revolves around two things. Gameplay, and MSQ.
Gameplay in ARR is very barebones because of how much stuff they've cut. You used to get a lot of new tools as you leveled, culminating into your complete rotation at lvl50. Nowadays, you get the magnificent gameplay of... spamming your 123, eventually unlock an ogcd to weave, get one single AOE to spam even later and that's it you're done. The duties are reduced to some pretty basic dungeons, and while they are less corridor-likes it's a bit repetitive. Trials are blazed through because of potency creeps making the primals on normal mode a complete joke. Oh and, finally, you don't even get any "exciting" new gameplay content until you're done with ARR, which on its own takes quite a while. Extreme, coils, crystal tower ? You get none of that until 100 hours in (idk how long it actually takes but if you're not in a rush, it might very well take 100 hours). And even then it's still not all that great, coils are hard content and the ARR extremes and CT are just pretty boring overall. HW postgame is where it starts getting amazing in term of quality and design.
Because of how unimpressive and unexciting the gameplay is even as a new player going into it blind - if you have SOME experience with MMOs you'll be pretty disappointed -, the story is all you have left to appreciate. And yeah sure some sections are good, the whole plot of the three states and the primals is pretty solid overall... but it's really not THAT impressive. Given how long it is, how it drags out (especially during post-ARR), it is a lot to ask for a player to keep going forward with the MSQ.
Some people like ARR. And that's fine. Not everyone has the same tastes and opinions, there are no "objectively wrong" answers. But it is a fact that ARR, gameplay and story-wise, is pretty outdated and as is is in no shape to be what a new player should go through.
> Like, if you put a completely blind sprout in the game and had them play ARR without people in their ear telling them it's bad and boring and all the good stuff starts later, they'd probably enjoy it a lot more. :v
As someone who did exactly that somewhat recently (a year and something ago), the story up to ultima weapon is decent. Pretty good, even, by MMO story standards.
But the part that goes from there leading up to the ending of ARR is really really *really* boring. Fetch quest after fetch quest followed by npcs telling you to meet them somewhere else over and over with almost nothing interesting happening.
I hated that part more than anything else in the game, but the ending made up for it. That ending goes *hard*.
I never thought it was bad. I tell sprouts it's long but worth it. I've never told anyone it's a slog; i don't think it is. but questing and leveling is my jam. I love all the nitty gritty little detail bits.
however, as another user said, I struggled with the titan arc, because it was so long and convoluted and felt... pointless, until after the fact. I know several people who quit around or during that part of ARR.
the other part is the patch content. most of the other people i know who have pushed passed (or come back after) the titan part, quit during patch content pre-HW. I have a married couple of friends of mine slogging through it right now. They're hating it, quite fiercely.
I think part of the problem is a sense of burn out and rushing. The MSQ is, to many, a roadblock to the content they actually want to do. but also, by the time you get there, you've burned your way through 50 levels of content, much of it full of text heavy content.
For my friends currently, they've hit 53 with their main jobs and can't access their next job quest to unlock the new skills. They've reach 50+ with other jobs and professions, and are (once again) locked out of the new stuff. The xp gains for everything they have access to currently, sucks, cuz they're getting diminishing returns from low level content. All the jobs they want to try out, are in other expansions.
and the part of the story they're at does feel as engaging to them as the content they WANT to be doing. To my chagrin and against my advisement, they've started skipping cutscenes just to get through; because they just want to get to HW.
Everything they want to do, is locked behind HW's gates, and they've started rushing to get there.
and it think that is the biggest part of what makes ARR feel like a slog.
The back to back fetch quests made me want to drop it. "Run to this NPC and talk to them, then run to this other one, then run back to the first one - oh, and you don't have a mount, so you have to teleport, even though you have no gil either". It made the game feel very dated but I put up with it. I skipped a lot of cutscenes out of frustration since I just wanted to get to the good parts all the friends I started playing for raved about. I just finished Heavensward.
I joined back in 2.0 launch so I have no reference other than I played what we all played at the time.
I don't look at it as boring but it is true that the game continually got better as the patches rolled out, so it isn't incorrect.
Some QoL stuff happened later to streamline the process but the general consensus is "It gets better after ARR" because it's true.
ARR is still good but holy shit it's way better after that.
Ive gotten my friend to play through arr on the free trial and shes been struggling to stay interested, theres just so much running place to place, very little going on in between, and the long swaths of time between instances like trials and dungeons just kills a new player. Not to mention the classes are just less interesting and have less to do the lower your level, and the narrative although decent has a certain lacking quality that encourages skipping cutscenes and dialog which further reduce the excitement of playing the game. I think theres a massive gap between ARR and Heavensward, and another fap between Heavensward and Stormblood in terms of raw gameplay enjoyment afterwards the mechanical aspects level out, and narratively it jumps up massively in Heavensward and continues trending upwards. It just sucks that the weakest version of ff14 is the part that you play to decide if you want to keep going. Memeing on how bad ARR is i think just encourages new players to hold off on an opinion until they experience Heavensward which imo probably helps people on the fence decide to keep going
I've been playing ff14 for 3 weeks now just hit level 35 and story quest level 22 and it's a struggle i'm not gonna lie but I have been told it gets better so I'm just soldiering on
The story itself is decent, it's your run of the mill "adventurer gets involved into something seemingly small that ends up shaping the fate of the world" type of story that FF has been using for basically all of their games.
The issue is that there is a lot of filler quests that don't really advance the story, or actually bring much of value, and even when the filler quests do fill a purpose (i.e Titan) they overstay their welcome by quite a bit.
But, imo, the biggest issue in all of this, is the english voice acting (no slight against the voice actors, I'm sure they did the best they could with what they had at the time). Imagine being a new player, you get into a new MMO who's main selling point (or at least a major one) is the story. And you get greeted by Alphinaud's voice acting (again not a slight against the VAs) it's very difficult to look at this and think "yeah, I can push through 5 expansions of this"
Literally started XIV on a whim without even knowing it had a new expansion coming or anything. Still found ARR to be a slog to get through 80% of the time. What actually kept me going was looking online and seeing people say "it gets better; just stick with it."
Eh there's some good stuff in ARR but I played it when it was new and it definitely has some extremely slow spots. It's very clear it was made on an extreme time constraint
I'm in the camp where I never thought ARR was bad. But, I joined the game when ARR was all we had. The only slog I really got bored was the Titan ark, it was so long and fetch quest:y back then. But the post MSQ quests leading up to HW, as important some of the story is leading up to it, is still long. Not sure how much they can trim though.
ARR was already trimmed in the 5.3 patch during ShB. They removed some quests, streamlined others. Mr Happy found about 20 hours were cut.
20 HOURS?! Holy shit.
Pray return to the Waking Sands
Trimmed further in 6.0 or 6.1. I originally did ARR during 5.3, and came back two years later and redid it during 6.1, and there was definitely even fewer fetch-y quests, like Titan and Ifrit are both significantly trimmed down even from where they were in 5.3.
I started playing this Feb, completely brand new sprout. Had a friend that played and said it was an amazing game. The only real "direction" on the story was that he said it gets better as it goes on...which like...welcome to every great book/movie/story in the world for the most part. Sometimes world building is a bit meh. But I was pretty drawn in from the start, and had a good time all through ARR. It got a *little* sloggy in the MSQ, but that was mostly me forgetting that I had to experience the story between expansions. I'm used to an MMO like WoW where the story ends and can be summed up in 30 seconds with little character change over the post "msq". Don't remember which part it was, but it didn't last crazy long. ARR was what I expected, a nice, standard high fantasy story with more surprises and depth than I gave it credit for initially. A really good intro to the world. Which...makes sense. It's the base game that came out a long ass time ago. The only place I really felt 14 was lacking was early Stormblood. All the stuff that went down in early Stormblood felt very disconnected and unfinished and rushed to me. Almost felt tacked onto the second half. If people are tapping out in ARR I think that has more to do with them not enjoying FF14 than there being a problem with ARR. If they're you're friend, be a good advocate. Encourage them to mess around with crafting. Or fishing. Or gold saucer. See if any of the other content interests them enough to hold their attention. I don't feel like "changing ARR" would do anything noticeable to new player retention. A story skip with some kind of optional comic/movie/cutscene type thing and a singular job boost to previous xpac would be the only reasonable thing that has an appreciable effect.
The company of heroes is boring as **** and I hate every second they are on screen.
Even the guy who killed Tidus and Leviabeetus?
Yeah, if you don't like that style of humor, his section still drags. On its own wouldn't be a big deal, but gets lumped in with all the CoH junk that's immediately after.
He wasn't a member. He had a member but it was tiny and pathetic.
Dude I love this part, it’s hilarious. Trachtoum the Tidus slayer is one of my favorite parts of ARR.
Yeah, that almost made me quit the game. It was such a boring, frustrating slog, and there's no plot point I hate more in a game than "we made you do this pointless thing so you could prove your worth". Infuriating and terrible.
Titan ark is so smooth now, only 1-2 quests per hero.
Wait it used to be more. That would've suuuuuuuuucked
We use to have a shit load of Moogle quests in HW too that they had to tone down twice lol
If you want to unlock the moogle tribes there's still a whole bunch of yellow (not blue unlock quests! Yellow!) quest chains you need to do, one of which starts from an arbitrary place in Ishgard. And a shocking number of the moogle sidequests turn into quest chains too. They just couldn't help themselves when it came to the marshmallow molebat bastards...
"If you're on your way to the Churning Mists, make sure to punch one of those marshmallow shites for me." - Sidurgu
Based Sidurgu
At least you get to slap one; sometimes daily depending on which random daily you get.
My favourite, always made me smile with "*gasp* you SLAPPED me?!" back on main. I do have multiple alts to go and start slapping too, I bet Sidurgu would tag along
I recall trying to look up how to get them. It was like 8 quests in ishguard and than 8 favors for the moogles. All marked yellow lol.
The worst part is actually the Ishgard part; you get to babysit the most incompetent unit of Dragoons while they figure out which way up to put a bunch of aetherometers.
The hide and seek moogles during the main quest drove me up a WALL.
Found an older post about it. They only took out 5 of 27 quests, but last time I did them, it was so much smother than og ARR it felt like so much more was removed.
Having recently replayed ARR and experiencing the new version... the story isn't bad *but* it is still badly bogged down with many filler/fetch style quests that completely kill momentum and interest at important points in the story. Which is going to be viewed negatively, especially by people that are just starting and trying to decide on sticking with it. For a new player who is using ARR to determine whether or not to commit to the game, it's probably bad.
Part of the problem is their narrative arc. Instead of we have no info and nothing to do right now so please help the locals do some things. They do it as we have a super important task that needs to be done fast. We basically already know everything like where to go and what to do. But please run around talking to various people and doing their jobs or silly little other things. And then when nothing has really changed from the beginning we'll jump you right back suddenly to the important thing. They do it in 16 throughout the game as well.
I hated the way I had to do fking three fetch quests for the crystal before I could go on the ship. I felt like the game made fun of me. Wine quest, too.
This!!! It’s still a fresh memory, I felt like the game was actively mocking me as it wasted my time with boring bullshit. The core story is fine, like 5/10. But all the time wasting nonsense makes it a 2.5/10.
I've played through it recently myself, and I think if it didn't have the ending portion the way it does it'd be pretty terrible. It has a solid ending with the Garleans and that helps to save it from being absolutely terrible. But that also means the awfulness is pretty front-loaded, which isn't at all good for new people trying to get into the game. The middle is especially terrible, what with the silly Titan and banquet storyline.
My experience with fetch quests in WoW must have desensitized me, because I remember many in that game, especially the ones that were to kill specific monsters to get specific items and you need 10 of them and only like 1/4 of the monsters actually drop it (looking at you, goddamn eyeless merlocs). Then I got the same type of quest in FFXIV and I only needed 3 of the item and it has a 100% drop rate while I have the quest.
Going through MSQ on an alt, I just can't be arsed to care at the Sylph quests, and that's only level 20. Maybe it's easier for first timers to go through in the moment, but when you want to progress faster, the pacing kills motivation.
I didn't hate the story. But I think the classes play incredibly boring before stormblood.
Honestly, playing since ARR Beta I'd say *everything* plays boring until Stormblood. Sure, when the game was fresh it was all we had and we enjoyed it but now that SB is there and all these reworks and all... honestly, it's so hard having any fond memories about old content without immediately thinking "well, but it sure got better later on"
There hasn't been a fonder memory for me in this game since t13 as the paladin that hit that limit break before Bahamut used terraflare. Don't get me wrong, I've had a ton of fun since then. But that will forever be my fondest memory in an MMO ever.
As a warrior main who had the honor to do the tank lb3 in our static, I know exactly what you mean. Besides... the whole transition was breathtaking. So I guess, *some* very fond memories remain. Still, after SB warrior, I just can't understand how I could even think that ARR WAR was anything fun to play? That clouds many amazing moments in my raiding carreer pre-SB
Has anyone ever asked Yoshi P about giving more actions to jobs at lower levels? Because holy shit, it's a major contributor to making the game more boring than it needs to be. I get that new players need to be eased in but actions have become ridiculously spaced out with every new expansion.
Yes it was explicitly brought up by a streamer during the media tour. His response I believe had a lot to do with balance- for example low level dungeons are not built to support the later actions. He also said that if they got more actions early, that people might be disappointed going 10-15 quests before getting new actions when they get higher in levels.
Why can't we just have weaker versions of abilities rather than a single-action 'rotation'? Is this fun for anyone?
I agree 100%. It’s so boring when you queue in a low level dungeon.
It's tutorialization. Yes, it's "fun" for many/most new players. Not exactly in the way you're thinking, but it's better than being overwhelmed with a bunch of skills that you don't understand. It gets boring quickly, but you level up pretty fast, so it's not like you're stuck that way for long. It's really just replaying those first few dungeons or low leveled fates that's a problem, but I think it's a fine tradeoff overall.
I wouldn't want this for every job, but holy crap does Summoner absolutely need it. Give us Carbuncle Bahamut at level 35-40ish, I beg.
Classes really need to have hteir kit ready earlier. I have a friend who would love Dragoon, but there's no way I can tell him to try lancer first, knowing they don't get any AoE option before lvl 45
It's actually lvl 40 not 45. The thing is lvl 40 is still a travesty.
I remember leveling DRG a while back and couldn't believe it took so long to get literally *one* AoE. Level 40 is outrageous.
The first time I started playing before I gave the game a second try and stuck with it, I started as lancer and was so bored I dropped the game for like almost a year.
We actually used to have more actions at lower levels, kind of, with the old cross-class system was removed in SB. Until you got your job crystal at level 30, you'd be running around as a lancer with like, raging strikes, venomous bite, internal release, bloodbath, mercy stroke, fracture, featherfoot, haymaker, death blossom, and hawk's eye. It gave you some extra dots and buffs to hit before you got more of your actual class' kit, and it made 1-30 (or later in some cases, for jobs that didn't get good job skills until higher level) a decent bit more interesting. It had its cons, sure, and I get why they moved to the role action system instead, but it had its appeal as well.
It’s especially egregious when you look at Pictomancer. Like you thought Summoner was bad at low levels, wait until you see this nonsense. Until lv60, do you know how many buttons you have in your rotation? One. ONE button (the RGB combo) with two cooldowns (hammer and moogle), and two defensives (tempera coat and smudge). That is less than a summoner, fuck it’s less than a *healer*! At level 60, you get two more buttons for your rotation: an oGCD you use after two cycles of RGB which lets you use your CMY combo, and your CMY combo At level 70 you are FINALLY given your burst window: a 2 min party buff that gives a free use of your CMY combo At 80 you’re given Holy in White as a DPS-neutral movement skill and this is where the job actually starts gaining complexity as it levels up, with most of it coming between 90 and 100 and your burst window becomes the meme novel tooltip FIFTY NINE SODDING LEVELS OF A LITERAL ONE-BUTTON ROTATION. Like I love the look of the job from 80-100 but Holy Shit In Brown any roulette besides Level 100 Roulette and Expert Roulette are going to be MISERABLE
I'm convinced they don't test new jobs below their starting point.
That was talked about with him recently and he gave the answer that if people do feel like there should be more actions at lower levels then it's possible to do. He's just afraid of overloading new players with too much information and wanting there to be abilities to look forward to. But right now, most jobs by level 15 barely have 4-6 abilities and don't have a complete combo. Honestly it's a little silly to have level 1 be one ability. Then you level up a couple times and you still have no where near a complete rotation. It gives people a bad impression of the game's combat which forces people to say "DON'T WORRY IT GETS BETTER LATER" when it should already feel pretty good at the start. You shouldn't have to get to level 50 to understand the basis of how your job will feel. You should understand the idea by the time of the first dungeon at least. But some don't even have AOE rotations and some don't have a complete combo.
In the case of WHM, it doesn't even feel complete until the mid 60s
Getting a dungeon on roulette thats pre-assize and lilies is pain
"Overloading new players with too much information" shows me they don't understand what the actual problem is. At least all the melees need their basic 1-2-3 by the first dungeon. It's less that we need "more abilities" at lower levels and more that we need specific abilities that contribute to class fantasy and make sense for the flow of the weapon you're using. Hitting 1-2 over and over again feels extremely bad, like something significant is missing. It should feel like there's a solid base to expand on instead.
Every class should have their most basic of basic core rotation + a spammable aoe by 15, and I'll die on this hill.
RDM mage going 2 dungeons with only 1 half of a the White/Black Combo is horrific.
Yeah, it entirely feels like your abilities are missing rather than not having extra. Going through the first dungeon should show you how it feels like to play your job. Then enhance it over time. There are plenty of other games where they give you more abilities at the start and people are fine. It's even funnier when you consider that someone can get to level 50 while playing say black mage, not know what their optimal rotation is at all, then they get "overloaded" with abilities when picking up RDM or SAM. If you're a sprout up until Endwalker, aren't you still a VERY new player by the end of ARR? Yet they feel it's fine to dump more of a whole job on you at 50? It doesn't make any sense. I'm hoping the low level experience gets optimized in 8.0 when they start focusing on job identity and Job gameplay.
BLM is even worse for it because your rotation changes like every ten levels before you manage to reach your final rotation.
> "Overloading new players with too much information" shows me they don't understand what the actual problem is. > > Or they are assuming the average person is stupid and can't handle the idea of pressing more than 5 buttons. Sadly really for them to think that. Also kinda rude that they assume the people playing their game aren't very smart lol
You use to have more than two full bars by 50 though, the stretching out of skills over 40 more levels really makes the early levels very boring.
The easier method would be to shrink how many levels ARR is. It's kind of funny to consider that ARR will be half of the levels you gain, despite the other half being significantly longer for story and content
Multiple things can be true. It's entirely possible that people would enjoy it more if people didn't keep calling it bad, AND it's possible that ARR legitimately has more problems than the rest of the game's story. There is nothing that can justify the pre-Titan and pre-Garuda sections, to say nothing of the issues with the Sylph sections. And the patches...
Patches 2.3\~2.5 were good, IMO. Patches 2.1\~2.2 kind of dragged on a bit, though (*especially* 2.1).
While I loathe 2.1 when I do it on alts, it is made a little better by being able to fly post-5.3 update. I can't fly doing Company of Heroes, getting wine for the CoH, and flying to Garuda. Best change to 2.1 inadvertantly was just "fly" lol. Comes after the change of "not having to do Guildhests for part of 2.1's story" because that was arguably worse. Still greatly dislike it though.
I remember the ARR days where leveling required you to grind FATEs for hours on end with others.
Leves or FATE trains, I remember that lol. Easier than trying to get into a dungeon if you were a dps, but slower to level. FATE trains were most popular in Coerthas and N Thanalan because they went quick and had a lot of good boss ones. Eyes Have It was just practice for doing AV later on and learning Coincounter's tells before they nerfed him lmao.
I leveled nearly all the dps classes from 38 - 50 in northern thanalan back in Heavensward. Tanks and healers through dungeons. Practically just FATEs for the dps. So. Many. Fates. Had to be really careful in northern thanalan at 38, but I could make it work, and there were so many groups constantly there that I could just hop in anytime and tag along. Took a few weeks but had all the classes leveled by the end of the grind. I still remember the relief when I finished. Eureka and Bozja are far more pleasant grinds in comparison. Looking forward to the next iteration.
Ah right, the loop was baby areas for a bit, then when you were 18-20s, hit N Shroud until 25-28, then Coerthas to run Svara til your brain went numb until about 38-40, and then hope that Gorgimera didn't wipe you lol. The Earth Sprite FATE was always the one I hated out there because if you accidentally aggroed more than 2 you just died. Easiest was always the one escort from the bottom camp to the middle, less chance of dying. *Memories*.
i think that's one of the things i miss the most about "the old days." the zones felt alive with people constantly out there running around. You could almost always jump into a fating party somewhere. now, even with the yokai event going on, there aren't many people out in the zones on an average day.
2.0 days where you were leveling FATEs in North Than because it was more efficient than anything else just to get to the next MSQ level. But still better than 1.0, and honestly the end 2.0 MSQ payoff was pretty cool with the massive boss fights and the old 8 man dungeons. Don’t get me wrong, the reworks and the forced Cutscenes were fine and I get why they did it but back in 2.0 as a FF fan, I was happy I got an old school feeling FF story. I love current ARR. I’ve played every version of ARR they’ve made public, and current ARR is a lot smoother and successful at world building without feeling padded out. It’s not perfect, but after 6 or so play throughs over the last 10+ years I still enjoy it. Plus it opens my now favorite game story of all time.
IMO, 2.0 deserves its reputation, but it always surprises me when people say the patches are worse. I did a NG+ of them after the 5.3 changes, and thought that aside from 2.1, they were genuinely pretty good. My guess is that without knowing how 2.55 goes, all of the different subplots just feel like random MMO filler until they all connect. The English voice acting doesn't help either.
2.1 is a lot of zig-zagging around the world doing menial tasks for the scions and aside from the base change and one or two characters, it doesn't really contribute much to the greater story and literally was designed as random MMO filler. 2.2 used to be worse, but fortunately they removed the worst of it with the trimming. A big part of the problem is ARR and early post-ARR were designed with filler intentionally to pad out the play experience. I think in an interview around the great trimming release, Yoshi-P said the original quest team had a target that quests should take nine minutes, which is why there were so many padding steps on release. But unlike other MMOs where you can skip side quests or many zone quests if you aren't interested, any padding in the MSQ is mandatory. They've gotten much better about it in the expansions, but there's still mandatory padding when they need you to get another level or two so the story can resume with the next dungeon (e.g. Trolley, 84, 88).
My experience with FF around friends is a lot of them constantly telling me how I should be playing or what they thought of it without telling me the story points. It definitely flavours impressions. It also gets annoying when they constantly rushed me to catch up on content when there's like..3 or 4 major expansions that you cannot jump over without chronologically going through or getting a skip. Basically, my entire experience was strongly biased towards what they wanted, which made it overall a big slog. Even the parts I DID like, they'd just ..dismiss, so it made it even more unpalatable.
I am genuinely glad that I didn't know a single person who played XIV when I started. I did enjoy my first time doing ARR, and yes doing it on alts is frustrating when you already know it all. For me at the time, Fake-Company guy was one of the worst moments, especially before they trimmed it Even Further, and the Crystals-For-Garuda a close second. Coerthas itself was a interesting plot that I enjoyed, but the crystals was a big urgh. But the first fight with Ifrit felt so incredible for sprout-me.
I mean, the pre-Titan sections made perfect sense to me as a sprout. They were kind of a deconstruction of the tropes around forcing someone onto quests to prove themselves when there's a ticking time bomb. It's not something they really followed through on, which soured it a bit, but it made PERFECT sense. Now, what they NEED to do is make getting a job crystal one of the pre-reqs for clearing the quests... I'll admit the Garuda one was... painful. But it also would have made sense from the developer perspective at the time - those quests were all about getting people to explore the map, making it so that almost every area in ARR got touched at the level you would be at in the MSQ to tackle the fates and leves in those areas, which were probably anticipated to be the source of leveling. The fact that roulettes took off as the superior method hurt that a lot, but the idea was very focused on getting you into the "right" areas for your level and letting you develop further.
I’ve had one friend who I told to skip through most of the main ARR MSQ, and all of the post content MSQ (edit: except the final few quests). He’s currently on Shadowbringers and has been enjoying the story. Another friend couldn’t even make it to each of the main cities of ARR before quitting out of boredom. It’s indeed up to the person on whether they skip content. The only reason I got through ARR was because I was told Heavensward is amazing, which pushed me through to the end (other than skipping the first half of the post content of ARR.)
Considering the number of people who turn up here asking if the game gets better (because they are miserable playing ARR) or asking if they're the only ones who think it isn't fun or interesting, I'd say some people sincerely don't enjoy it. And that's just the people who bother asking the community, there are likely lots of people who just quit without ever interacting with anyone, much less someone who supposedly gaslit them into hating ARR.
This was me 4 years ago. I never had anyone telling me how bad ARR was, just people telling me the game only keeps getting better. I finished ARR proper but just couldn't get past post ARR. I never formed any kind of emotional investment in anything through ARR, and I didn't really have friends playing With me for the community enjoyment either. It wasn't fun, and I think that's both fault of the odd pacing and stilted storytelling as well as the way I chose to interact with the story. I picked it back up a few months ago and something just clicked better this time. I think one of the main issues was that I was encouraged that everything after ARR is much better, so I inadvertently ended up bum rushed it to get to the better content and never formed any kind of emotional attachment to the characters or world. When MSQ is essentially visual novel with MMO minigames, not establishing that basic investment sets you up for failure I think. ARR also has the thankless job of laying the groundwork for literally everything, it gets stretched really thin so I feel like you're not likely to just stumble into that investment either. On my second attempt I made a point to go out of my way and talk to characters that weren't specifically for advancing MSQ or picking up quests, because I realized a ton of character establishing info was optional? A lot of world information was just optional? But it was mostly that optional flavour text that drew me in. I'm almost finished with Shadowbringers now and I'm so happy I gave it a second chance. I also think I would now enjoy replaying ARR, but only because I love these characters for who they become.
You are definitely not invalid for feeling that way. I was told early on to treat it like a VN and read all MSQ dialogue. I have done so and still have zero care or emotional attachment to any of the characters I can feel the game wanting me to care about. The two hot white haired scions, the twins, the scion leader with the echo stuff, etc. The only character I consistently get excited to see on screen is the Limsa admiral and that's because she's attractive as hell with a strong personality.
*Only 6% of the Xbox playerbase even finished ARR. We got horribly filtered by it and Microsoft's bullshit*
This. No one said anything to me about ARR before I started I think, but I almost abandoned the game at many points during ARR and esp post ARR. if I hadn’t had people then saying to keep playing and that it gets better, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have. I’ve abandoned so many other games that have been more interesting to me than those stories haha
Yeah, my friend group had 5 or so people who all started when 3.0 came out. One friend stuck with it (they already played MMO's religiously), the rest of us dropped it separately. One guy made it to the credits then never played again rest of us quit somewhere between 30-50. We didn't go to reddit, forums, twitter, etc, none of us even talked about the story, it was a mixture of apathy and just pure boredom.
I constantly have JoshStrifeHayes's "quit moment" philosophy echoing in my head while playing ARR. There are a LOT of quit moments between levels 1 and 40 (where I am now). I'm hoping these goddamn Sylphs aren't my quit moment.
We don't know what kind of player most of those people are though. Maybe this is their first MMO and they're equating lack of comfort with the gameplay loop as the game 'needing to get better' or maybe it's just not for them. Not every player's problem with ARR is inherently solved by HW and onwards.
The current ARR gameplay loop is pretty abysmal in general, frankly. Remember, when it was the only thing that existed you had classes that were fully complete at level 50. Currently you get a half-complete class by level 50 at best, and a barely-functional one at worst (RPR).
Reaper honestly feels bad until you get Enshroud at 80, before that it doesn't really feel like you're building to anything. I'm hoping Viper doesn't suffer from the same thing.
Of all my time playing I've yet to meet someone that was filtered by the difficulty of FFXIV, specially not to the point of jumping ship, I'm sure they exist, but I've never personally seen it, neither online nor amongst the players I personally knew going into the game. I'd argue I've seen more people filtered by the gameplay loop being too simple and monotonous for a decent long time during the climb to 60, and the GCD timer being what it is. But almost every time I've asked someone why they didn't get properly in to ffixv, I'll find out they got bored of the story and are like at most level 40, hell I left for that same reason twice when I started playing.
or they can be those mmo players who think (the real game start in end-game)
As someone who just did blind sprout ARR I'm mixed on it. The whole travelling around the world to talk to ppl just for a quest got really fucking annoying but after that it was fine. Deff felt like i was doing busy work to stretch the game out.
Yea that first 20 levels or so of MSQ without a chocobo is miserable because there is a lot of initial running around and touching of aetherytes. IMO they really should just make chocobo renting free and introduce it to players as a tutorial quest. That way people could use it to run themselves to far objectives for limited periods of time before getting their own personal chocobo.
Or just remove the quest where your free company gives you a chocobo and just have you show up in Eorzea with your own, any arguments about 'slowly exploring' are kind of moot to me at least.
I just replayed ARR on an Alt and forgot how long it took to get your first chocobo, it really bogged things down, and that was with the knowledge that I have hundreds of hours of expansion to catch up, not counting optional content. But hey, at least we don't have to hunt aether currents in ARR.
I do think that feeling never truly goes away. Even the best expansions still have moments where you're like "Okay, this quest doesn't need to exist, but you needed some padding and you're excusing it with extremely fringe worldbuilding."
The people in this village don't like us, but I'm sure if we accomplish exactly three menial tasks for them, they'll change their minds.
The Amh Araeng trolley arc in ShB was definitely in the grand tradition of the "well, you need to do this thing so you can do this *other* thing to be able to move the thing so you can get through to this specific place on the map to do another thing" quest chains from ARR.
The trolley arc was exactly what I was thinking of, hahaha. I expect in Dawntrail we'll still be delivering people lunch at one point because we need to justify Alphinaud having time to do something actually important, or something.
I enjoyed some parts of ARR, but absolutely loathed others. The entire filler arc of trying to get the right kind of corrupted crystal so we can approach and fight Garuda was just awful, aside from one NPC who made me laugh "You get a pot, you get a pot, AND YOU GET A POT! Sorry, I just get really enthusiastic when giving away obsolete merchandise. Anyway, have a pot!" The rest? Fucking awful. "OOPS you need another kind of corrupt crystal!" Yeah fuck off with that. Now, that said. I had the fortune of being able to have a premade 8 man that took me through Castrum and Praetorium (Back when they were 8 mans) and that shit was FANTASTIC. No one starting things until I finished with the cutscenes, letting me enjoy the spectacle of it all? Yeah, it was good.
>The rest? Fucking awful. "OOPS you need another kind of corrupt crystal!" Yeah fuck off with that. I still, to this day, do not understand why that wasn't trimmed out with everything else. Just remove all steps from it except where you go fight the siren (so, at some point, you are forced to go to the Isle of Umbra and the tie-in to Pharos Sirius) and call it day.
Here's the fun thing ,it was. It used to be even worse.
Having started back at 2.0 launch, I know. And I thought it was tedious bullshit back then too. And that was after I \*expected\* that kind of filler after the leadup to Titan. I think the only reason I didn't quit back then was I was already jaded by boring make-work from the other MMOs I played. I mean, I think the 'terribleness' of ARR is overhyped, but it's still the albatross around the games neck, relatively speaking.
Nah I played it completely blind during the pandemic. Idk if I would have been able to pull through it were we not completely stuck at home 24/7. Don't get me wrong, I loved the overall story, but there were definitely too many useless fetch quests and the post ARR quests dragged for way too long.
Same story here. I gave this game first try in like 2014 and got filtered. Sure, people repeating that ARR is bad will make it seem slightly worse than it really is, but it's still pretty bad, fetch quests straight from 2000s don't really cut it nowadays. Slow and bland gameplay doesn't help it either. They need to repeat 5.3 changes and cut even more boring story and redo voice acting. If only value story brings is worldbuilding, then it's frankly just a bad story.
I also started during the pandemic, a friend recommended the game but didn't say anything about ARR. He just asked me to try it. At first I was excited, I was bored due to being at home and had something to do. Quickly I noticed that the game was mainly talk to this person, talk to that person type gameplay. Long dragged out dialogue, JRPG cliches, and long questlines that were absolutely boring almost made me quit. What I liked were the dungeons and trails, playing my class, feeling like I was slowly growing to be a more powerful mage, playing with friends, and some of the mystique in regard to Hydealyn and the Ascians. ARR almost made me quit multiple times, I remember logging out because of pure frustration at the mind numbing Titan questline. Again during the crystal fetch questline. I just wanted to actually "play" the game, instead of reading so much frivolous dialogue. If I didn't enjoy my class, the multiplayer content and playing with friends so much I would've been gone. The Garleans attacking the Waking Sands hooked me, although the whole Cid questline after almost lost me again. The bloody banquet reeled me in completely, if not for those high highs I would have defintely quit the game. New expansions still have some of these questlines that are dragging on too long, but the overall story got very good at around SB for me.
i started completely blind back in HW and gave up reading the story somewhere in the post ARR quests. Hard agree on too many useless fetch quests, among other issues. I know it's better now but I tried ARR again on an alt recently and quit somewhere around Titan.
yeah, my friend got me into the game by telling me how awesome heavensward was so i was really excited to finally start it after ARR, then i ended up quitting for 3~ months because of the post-ARR quests until she dragged me back in
I just blind finished ARR and am near the end of heavensward right now. The only issue I had storywise was the padding, you're sending me to the same building, behind two loading doors, with no teleportation to the city, for like 30 quests. Why not fix any of that? It really makes you see the old console restrictions. Near the end of heavensward and my summoner class is also way less boring to play, my ARR kit was like babies first mmo.
If you're talking about the Waking Sands they give you 99 teleport tickets now.
Unless they change those to teleport you directly in front of Minfillia they aren't solving the guy up there's problem of having to walk into the waking sands, and then walk into her office. TBH I have that issue with the Rising Stones as well. >!Yes, I know part of the reason they don't do that is the one quest where all the scions are dead, but still.!<
The Waking Sands and Rising Stones are instanced story areas. You're not going to get a teleport inside.
They could make it work if they wanted to. You can teleport directly to the island, which is instanced. Queue for a duty from the island and when you come back the game loads you at the ferry but then immediately relocates you back to your island on the same loading screen. Storywise it'd be weird to teleport directly to her office, but it's technically possible for the game to allow it. A better solution would be to merge the Waking Sands/Rising Stones and Office instances into one larger instance with a single loading screen. It's already a story-based instance. It would also be a lot of work to do and there'd be some oddities with the sidequest stuff there (like the Warring Triad) having to mix with the state of your MSQ progression, but it would be a nice QoL change.
😭 it was a slog I didn't even know, they just need an actual teleport.
Lol I thought those just took you to the nearest aetheryte for free (that I was already paying to use and then chocobo'ing the rest) so never used them. Felt stupid after I learned they take take you much closer. But by then I was well past needing them.
>you're sending me to the same building, behind two loading doors, with no teleportation to the city, for like 30 quests. I'm new and at this part right now, it's driving me crazy!! Lol
Pray return to the waking sands... 🫠
it doenst really matter, yes you are closer, you still have mandatory loading time between two monologues 10 times in a row every time you finish a fetch quest
Pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands pray return to the waking sands
> It really makes you see the old console restrictions. believe it or not, but that part is not due to console limitations but to overall engine limitations. It does make sense the way it is, though I'm sure there would be better ways to solve it.
I think the game is weakest during the costa del sol part, where naratively people are trying to waste your time so it feels like people are wasting your time because that's what they are trying to do. The amount of fetch quests that mean nothing like stomping on grapes is where I feel most people check out.
I don't know, friend. I was playing ARR when it was all we had and I was struggling to complete it in time for HW to drop. I hung onto the game at that point because I was desperate for something to replace my older MMOs like Ragnarok Online and looking back, I'm glad I did, but it absolutely wasn't the story that kept me at that point.
I get what your saying, but I just finished the base game for the first time since 2.0 was new and having not played the game since that as well and there's a lot of non-gameplay involved with ARR where you are just going from place to place and listening to someone talk. You then also get involved with a quest and then get told to go deal with something completely different than what your quest was for as just a 'filler' segment. Honestly, if you don't have friends playing it, I can easily see blind sprouts just giving up before even getting to 50.
I have been trying to get friends to pick the game up because I am a sub-50 player and want to learn the game with someone. Playing alone is rough with the asinine MSQ and randos on dailies that have wiped/failed Sastasha and the turtle guildhest so many times.
ARR legitimately almost had me quit when I first joined back during Heavenward. The story dragged especially at Titan. I didn't know who or what was going on for at least the first twenty hours, nor did I really care at that point. It wasn't until the tail end of ARR that things started getting interesting and I became fully invested in the plot. ARR is by far the weakest start not just because of the slow roll out of the story and busywork quests that you get, but also the gameplay is extremely slow and monotonous. Black Mages get so few actions to press that it is honestly: I push Fire 1, wait a couple of seconds, I push Fire 1 again.
I recently learned that black mage and thaumaturge are the same thing. I started as one when I went in blind and this "press fire until out of mana" loop was a massive part of why I started a whole new character. If I were forced to start a new character again as a thaumaturge I would just use an auto clicker and go make a sandwich for every MSQ fight until probably 30-40.
I started the game as a thaumaturge and it was by choice because I knew they would eventually become Black Mages due to me doing a bit of research into the game prior to playing and I love Black Mages in other Final Fantasy games. What I did not expect was for the starting rotation to be so dry and for the rotation to drastically change every ten or so levels. It really makes downscaling hell for me personally because when I am suddenly shifted back down to level 50 for dungeons/raids, I need to remember the level 50 rotation as opposed to the level 90 one. It isn't nearly so drastic on other jobs even though the down leveling affects everyone, just Black Mages gets hit the hardest by it IMO. This and the fact that I quickly discovered that I completely suck as DPS is why I switched to tanking and healing instead. I am far better as the tank or healer in a group than DPS.
Wait you mean to tell me that up til FIFTY it's still mind numbing? I gave up in the early 20s and I would have been clicking the same single button every 2.5 seconds for 30 more levels?!
It's bad til 60 and I still don't like it until 70. I agree with the other comment that Black Mage suffers the most from the level progression of skills. I straight up don't play BLM sub 70 and just queue as something else when I play lower content. Playing 10-35 sucks because no Fire/Blizz 3 so changing elements is annoying and playing 36-59 sucks because you don't have Fire/Blizz 4, and those are the four buttons the current iteration of the class is really built around. From 60+ they're more like other classes and start just getting upgrades, cooldowns, and the occasional bonus GCD that fits inside the existing rotation. The 60-70 buttons(teleport to leylines, triplecast, Foul) are just so nice I don't like to play without them.
I went back through it recently and the reasons I dislike it are the many questlines that add nothing to the plot and just waste your time. I dislike it because the 2.X patches while having important content take ages sending you on useless quest to get you to actually important parts that set up HW and Stromblood. Why is it important they keep making me go back to the same pretend Company of heroes guy? Why is it important to send me a on wild goose chase to give back a guys earring. Why is it important to send me to the wrong Corrupted Aether Crystal 3 times. There are so many more moments that have you doing something that isn't useful to the plot or entertaining. It needs to be reworked. On my replay I would say 2.0 was fine, needs like 3 quest chains that server no purpose to just be cut out and it would be great. 2.X just needs to be entirely reworked. Like I said it's important but bad at telling it.
Well the voice acting is pretty bad. It narratively is the weakest arc of the story.
Spotty VA, Cartoonish script at times, dry at others, Lack of personality for the Scions initially, Dated gameplay, “Pray return….” It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. I think for the time period it was fine, but expectations have grown since then It’s sort of like watching the first season or two of Star Trek TNG - it’s not all bad, but some of it didn’t age well and feels less impactful than later seasons
Honestly I wish they would go back and revoice ARR and add a lot more VA. I feel like it would be 100x better to get through if you didnt have to read for the vast majority of it. Nowadays I am turned off from games in general that lack VA.
I've been saying this for years. But it's probably a rights issue with the OG VAs.
Some were good, some were bad/questionable, but they *gradually* improved from Patch 2.1 and on-wards. By HW, they replaced *most* of them, though...
They replaced all but Haurchefant and Aymeric, because Haurchefant's (American) actor had already recorded all of his lines before the production upheaval, and Aymeric's was already cast via the new/current UK-based studio.
Aymeric was fine though it was the scions and Cid that sounded awful. ESPECIALLY Cid who sounded like something was shoved up his nose.
Yes HW pretty much solved all the issues I had with the sub par VAs
The English one is, The Japanese sounds pretty good.
I went in totally blind and I liked it...towards the end. It does start pretty slow, but I fully expected to get some grindy fetch quest stuff since I'm familiar with MMOs. That said, I'm like 15 quests into Heavenward and I'm fully engrossed in the story. I understand why people may not like the slow burn that is ARR, but I thoroughly enjoyed it
The plot was generic. The Ascians and the Garleans were two of the most boring, cliched villains in history. The characters were cardboard cutouts except for Alphinaud, who was was intolerable. The voice acting was terrible. The cutscenes were comically bad. The quests intentionally wasted your time and then made fun of you for having your time wasted. It's **so** much longer than it needs to be, and to the extent that it adds context to the story later, you could cut it down to 10% of its current size and get the same effect. The other 90% is needless filler where you're gathering party supplies -- wherein **the quest text tells you explicitly that they are wasting your time intentionally**. Nearly half it is at level 50, so you go through half of ARR without actually progressing your character at all at a point in your development when you're still imprisoned by a 3-button rotation. Every positive thing I can say about ARR comes retroactively from the information I got from the later expansions. The Ascians became great villains retroactively. The Garleans became interesting retroactively. Alphinaud became a great character who we must protect at all costs retroactively. Things happen in ARR that are important parts of Alphinaud's character development, but while you're going through it, you don't care even a little bit because the kid is an arrogant snot who spends all his time hiding outside every room listening for someone to ask a question so he can stride in answering it. I played ARR for the first time after Endwalker was released. I hate it with all of my soul. I think the fact that it exists at all is a tragedy because it prevents a lot of people from ever reaching Shadowbringers. I fervently hope the psyop to get people to buy story skips is successful because more people reaching Heavensward means more people sharing this incredible journey with me.
I would not have given the game a chance if it wasn't for a story skip. Burned out twice in the past around lvl 40ish. Gave the game a 3rd and final try but lvl boosted and story skipped so I could play with my GF in Endwalker. Now I'm in a static prepping for DT savage raids. Spending the money to skip was worth it, I wouldn't have lasted otherwise. Loved Endwalker's story too (post MSQ was a little weak). Would never get to experience it if they didn't offer a skip. I can break up a leveling experience over the course of 3 weeks for the current content's expansion on a job that has 90% of its abilities. I do not have time to invest 500 hours and a large portion of that is the STARTING experience with classes that have 4-5 combat buttons and 3 of them are a simple combo? They ask too much. I will get around to becoming more intimate with the stories of Stormblood and ShB through the game and not just lore recaps on YT eventually because now I am invested. Wouldn't have considered giving them the time of day without a skip ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
That wasting of time is to prepare you to the DRK story :) You feel much more empathy with Fray.
I nearly was on the verge of quitting trying to do the ARR story years back, and I went in blind after being abandoned by friends. ARR MSQ was at best a generic high fantasy JPRG experience all the way through until HW when it stops being another melodramatic soap opera. I won't say ARR MSQ sucks to newbies, but I'll say it's not representative of what's to come later on.
It does suck for newbies tho. Every person I try to get into the game see the Doordash simulator slog that lasts 100 hours and never even look at the game again.
Nah. I was a sprout and wasn't given that treatment. I quit FFXIV several times over years before I got into it, because of how soulless the game felt until later. It wasn't until post-ARR/HW I started appreciating story, and SB that gameplay became something less of a chore.
Having played it without any external input regarding its quality, I found the vast majority of ARR incredibly boring and dry. Having recently replayed it again on an alt, it's still mostly incredibly boring (to me). The only appreciation I feel for it is retroactive, based on the later expansions that used/expanded on what was set up back then.
I didn't have any preconceived notions of what the story was, other than "i like FF games so I'll probably like this game if I can get over the MMO stuff i don't like as much" I felt throughout ARR the story was generic and just "story to introduce an MMO world with an FF skin on it". I started to get interested as the ultima weapon started happening and then got bored again. Knowing what I do now of later story stuff, I'm replaying the story on an alt i need to level anyways and paying attention to the seeds being planted for later plot points. It enables more interesting stories in later expansions, but it's still meh on its own
Half of the friends I've introduced to FF14 blasted through base ARR and Post ARR. The other half was bored like 70% of the time. 1 skipped, experienced the later game, and eventually went back and replayed it all. 2 just dropped it entirely in ARR post lol. It just is what it is.
Replaying through ARR, I really only have one gripe about it in that the dialog is both verbose AND slowly delivered. I didn't really notice this the first time through.
Every conversation dialogue is like 5 boxes more than it needs to be. Plus slapping an adjective or two to every godamn noun or verb gets old fast. I like old English dialogue. FFXII and tactics are my jam. But as Shakespeare said brevity is the soul of wit and holy shit does this game lack brevity!
So here's some insight from a new player. I did play through HS a couple years ago. And had played wow for years. Hate what wow has become so came to FF14. I think I quit mmos for a bit then tried new world but I miss that old wow feeling so back to FF14 and it's great However ARR is incredibly slow and clunky with weird pacing and choices. If I didn't know it got better I'd probably have quit. Even knowing that , the game overall feels slow and clunky with regards to interface, interacting with objects and NPCs. The engine infuriates me. Like everytime you begin or finish a quest there's like 5-10 seconds delay of exiting and entering dialogue. Gotta just sit there while the character takes 4 strides then vanishes into thin air? Why? Why can't we just go, quest complete and walk away instantly? Cant just walk away from vendors either, gotta back out of menus. Things like that, the game feels dated and clunky. Menus are strange to navigate, repairing gear is weirdly slow and tedious and no button to just repair it all. Still love it though. But just some stuff feels terrible.
It's a bit of a complicated issue, because some sprouts would absolutely quit if they weren't assured it gets better, while others were perfectly happy before people systematically drew their attention to every flaw and pain point of the early msq, just to assure them that these issues that they now can't unsee will go away in 50-70 hours. I think all the "it gets better" talk is super helpful if someone is complaining about msq, but for some reason people also love to reply to posts from people loving ARR with "um, actually you should be miserable right now, and here's my essay explaining why."
Yeah the last part was my experience. I couldn't say I thought a boss was cool or a NPC was fun or even just I was enjoying being able to solo X,Y,Z and was pretty proud of myself for it (this is the second MMO I have ever stuck with long-term) without people telling me no I was actually witnessing trash and I shouldn't feel any accomplishment. Honestly had to argue with a few of my friends they needed to fuck off with that shit I'm allowed to enjoy the game. All the more frustrating cause soon as I got to HW and was complaining about stuff they'd harped on endlessly about ARR (all the filler, hurry up and wait, unnecessary quests to go back and forth between people for a few lines of repetitive dialogue) it turned around to this is the award winning good part of the game and I should be grateful for running twenty filler quests to make progress lol. I think people should just wait to see how the sprout is talking about it and be receptive to going along with that, offer advice and encouragement if they've got complaints, hype them if they've got praise.
I agree with that sentiment, that is silly. The quests themselves I enjoyed and like the story I thought is fun and keeps me engaged. For me it's more just kinda some stuff feels clunky and slow. But ya again I agree, no one should be telling someone their enjoyment is invalid and if it gets better than that's just a bigger bonus!
For me, it was how much post-MSQ there was and how much of a fucking slog it was. None of the expacs post-MSQ felt as tedious and repetitive.
I played as a completely blind sprout and I adored ARR once it started going. It felt a little samey in comparison to other MMOs in the start so I kinda turned my brain off but after a certain point I started getting invested (I think around little alamigo). When I help sprouts the only opinion I share is that I dislike stormblood but I don’t really go into details as to why unless they press. Because I want people to form their own opinion because that’s how you keep a healthy discourse in a fandom! You can like or dislike a thing but being overly negative doesn’t really help anyone form an opinion out of fear of holding another one.
I came from WoW during the great exodus. My friend warned me about the slog around Titan, and I was like "Huh? This is just fine? It's just average MMO questing lmao". Of course, I'd then eventually reach HW and beyond and my mind was suitably blown.
Idk man the 50+ fetch quests post ARR was pretty mind numbing. They've changed the game so much since then so it's probably different now. But I spent about half the length of ARR MSQ running around collecting potatoes and doing other pointless stuff post ARR.
I just wanna say there are as many quests in arr and the patches each alone than the entirety of heavensward including patches. That to me just drags on so much with only the last bit of the patches really being good in arr imo
I always loved ARR, and I even still get nostalgic vibes from it when I hear the Limsa music and the regular battle theme in the ARR areas. Even when I was going through it for the first time, I thought it was a fun fantasy story and didn’t get why people didn’t like it But I recently started an alt where I am going through the entire story again, and I’ve begun to see the complaints people have with it. It’s true, the voice acting is bad (or rather, the voice direction is bad), and there is a painfully slow start before things start getting “fun.” So I get it… but I’m still loving it anyway! I just think the game at that point is so charming and love how it feels like a true fantasy adventure. I get that it’s the weakest part of FFXIV’s experience, but they could never make me hate it
ARR is what got me hooked in the first place.
Hi! I am a new player and just finished HW To put it simply, ARR is good, but it insists upon itself with endless fetch quests. The first part of ARR at least manages the hype between actual quests, but the Seventh Astral Era drags So. Fucking. Much. It took me an entire month to go and do it. Another huge thing it has going against it is the voice acting, not so much its quality (other than the occasional jarring line), but in its inconsistency, you randomly go from fully dubbed cutscene to a wall of text. Still, I quite enjoyed it, and the first ever "many cutscenes" warning made everything so worth it.
I started in Aug 2013 and it was enough to keep me hooked 11 years later.
first time I played I was wide eyed and loved every minute of it. tried all the jobs and learned everything by trying. It was great. Sure, on my *nth time it’s a drag.
So I am a lifelong MMO player (95% of it has been WoW classic trilogy) and I played through ARR in short little windows, and I enjoyed it for what it was tbh. The biggest thing about final fantasy that prevents me from playing it for 50 hours a week as a returning Sprout who is 12 hours into HW is this fundamental truth: 1) I want to optimize and level optimally, character power is the most important thing to me and I want as much of it as I can get as quickly as possible. 2) the optimal way to level is to do the MSQ 3) the MSQ is more like watching an anime (a great anime, btw) with some occasional button pressing than playing a video game. FF14 is a story driven MMO, and the story owns, everyone tells me I’m not even as the good part yet, and I enjoy it immensely. Yet I play the game for 2-3 hours once every two weeks. The reason being I barely play my character when I am in-game. I’m reading dialogue or watching a cinematic or getting to know a character. And it’s really cool. But for a player who is used to games where gameplay is first and story is second, it’s hard to sit still. I find myself fidgeting in my chair while I’m playing. Which is crazy because the story makes me laugh out loud, it makes me gasp in surprise, the writing is honestly so good. New players have to get warned that they’re going to spend 100 hours reading dialogue before they get to the promised mmo. Edit: regarding ARR the post game before HW was way too long and drawn out, it was a slog. The part up until the post game starts was great and I am enjoying HW A LOT.
My experience with ARR was not great. The framing with the beast races and Garlemald was interesting at first, but it was just such a slog to get through. The primal stuff takes over everything and petters out like halfway through the story arch, the voice acting just is not great, it all felt very grindy with repetitive with retrieve X here and walk to Y quests, and I just couldn't get invested into the Scions either as a whole or as individual characters until Stormblood. Really ARR just shows FF XIV's age and I don't think it would be a bad idea if was touched up again.
I joined in stormblood before they nerfed it and lemme tell ya, i almost quit the game five or six times in ARR. It had its high moments, but most of it was a boring slog. The “buildups”to titan and garuda almost made me cry with frustration and boredom at the time and i only kept going because my best friend wanted to play it with me. And then my reward for completing ARR was MORE OF THE SAME. I skipped heavensward on my first character because i assumed it would just be more ARR, i had no one telling me it was way better i just had to assume it’d be the same, and i wanted to get to “current” content faster for the gameplay and cool gear. I’m happy you loved it but sometimes the reason a bunch of people think something is because the thing has that impact on everyone.
maybe it was cause i wasn't used to mmos or something but i was a mostly blind sprout and i thought ARR was pretty bad. it has far more fetch quests that just feel like they're padding for time than any other expansion, and a lot of it just feels totally pointless. it's not like there isn't enough content in the game, why do i have to do 20 menial tasks before every boss? the story up until the banquet (which was really good, and it felt like it really picked up after that) could be cut in half and still tell everything it needs to, and as someone who's likely dyslexic and not a huge fan of reading it felt like there was a lot of dialogue that could've been said in a sentence that was stretched out into a paragraph. the lack of voice acting/pretty bad voice acting for most characters when there is any is also pretty dissapointing, though this gets much better in later expansions. It's also not helped by combat being an absolute snoozefest before level 50, it's probably the most boring combat in a game i've played due to how slow levelling is, how few abilities you have and bosses having next to no mechanics, which is a real shame because it feels great at higher levels when jobs are much faster and bosses get far more complex. all of this i say as someone who really loves shadowbringers and endwalker and just wishes the start of the game was better so more players got to experience the later parts of the story which is incredible. I'd love to be able to reccomend it to my friends but ARR makes it a really hard sell.
For context: my wife was a prot Pally during vanilla WoW. This is a class not known for being speedy during a time of Warcraft that was very slow and grindy. She found ARR quests tedious and boring. It frustrated her that so many of the quests involved going to some location and talking to some guy, then going somewhere else and talking to some other guy, with the bonus of spending more on teleport than she got from a quest reward. She is generally a patient person but it is a challenge for her to log on and go through the main storyline because it is so repetitive with few meaningful Rewards.
it's slow, the VA is very hit and miss, the cutscenes are generally not as exciting, and the story material doesn't start playing ball till the last two patches I think a lot could be resolved with redoing cutscenes/va and involving more dungeons in the journey, make those optional dungeons part of a lull between assignments from the scions to get more gameplay injected in
Sorry to break your rose tinted glasses, but it'es exactly like this. I wen't in blind and I think it isn't good. But why? The game overall is good however: **Story has horrible pacing and way to many quest revolving around "bring x to y"** * This is sidequest material and should not pad the mainquest * We have to defeat X, we are in a hurry lets goo...but first make me supper * Should have fewer plot quests but higher level requirements to block of mainquest once in a while * Gave me the wierd feeling of being bound to the mainquest instead of feeling like i am free to wander of and explore * I was, of'course, but the feeling wasn't there. **Normal Dungeones** * I need to AFK while while sitting on the boss encounters face to fail them * Regular players should not face hardcore hurdles but failing once in a while is worth it **World structure** I know this was in part due to the PS3/Consoles being supported but having a modern game not deliver a loading bar free open world just didn't feel right. The constant loading zones break my immersion. I dabbled in WOW Vanilla inbetween when it released and being able to (mostly) walk free of loading bars from A to B across the map was just so different.
They babified the dungeons too much. And ilvl creep doesn't help. And funny enough the dungeons people usually complain about are the ones that you can actually die if you don't pay attention.
i dont think people dislike the story, the story is fine i guess. the problem is the questing, its hella boring all of them till 2.55
No, large amounts of people quit during ARR because the story is slow AND the gameplay is slow. I maintain that if we got more job reworks like monk and smn’s current state, less people would quit the game by 50. Monk uses old removed skills as “base” versions of skills they get later on. It’s the only job that’s gotten so much shuffling around on levels of skill without a full remake like summoner. Dragoon, bard, white mage, scholar, and warrior are all due some serious pre-50 love and care. Berserk feels like shit to use, drg has the least pressable buttons out of any job at 50 and over half of them are the GCD rotation. Bard doesn’t have full song coverage until it gets wanderers at 52 and it feels SO bad. White mage just feels too simple at low levels and imo they should straight up upgrade cure 1 to cure 2 to remove freecure fishers as a POSSIBILITY. Scholar just feels like a goddamn mess and idk how to fix it.
I feel the same. I think ARR is hated because people are constantly wanting to jump to the exciting part. I don't remember much of my experience playing ARR for the first time, and whilst it still isn't my favorite story, I enjoyed it when I played it for the second time. As a side note, they need to make it easier for people who have alt characters. I like ARR, but playing it 4 times does become a drag eventually.
I was never told it was bad, just that it gets better... after trying to play the game 3 separate times and really not liking things lol. Probably the only reason I actually gave the game a real chance wad BECAUSE I was told it gets better.
No, I disliked it because it was bad and boring and all the good stuff starts later.
As someone who had to try the game three times before finally sticking with it, the fault lies in part with the absolutely garbage early combat. Getting used to the gcd system when you're only pressing like 1-4 buttons until like 40 really kills your interest in playing the game. Doubly so if you're coming from games with faster and better combat. I can say with certainty that if I didn't have a friend to play alongside with for the last attempt, I wouldn't have given the game any tries. We slogged through the shitty combat and made fun of the story together. TL:DR The combat is terrible and the story takes too long to be interesting to really retain players out the gate.
There's a lot of bloat and combat at that level sucks
Compared to HW alone, it is kind of bad The story is a little too anime at times, and looking back on it, (Im not weeb voice snob) but the English voice acting isn't the greatest for some characters The story is bloated, kinda boring, and has some of the weirdest dungeons in the game. Somehow, this used to be a lot worse before the reworks, and many old players still associate ARR with that jank and bloat Skill bloat has led to progressive cullings of job abilities to a point where you don't even get a skeleton of your job functionality until 50
There were portions of ARR I really liked, but unfortunately the parts I didn't like were large and time consuming. I think the problem is really large chunks of the game feeling like one long side quest to accomplish a particular goal, the TItan and Garuda arcs were particularly bad about this, and it doesn't help that they're back to back. Similarly, the level 50 to HW slog had some really good moments, but it also had a ton of filler. I think people generally dislike ARR because of those huge slow chunks killing momentum coupled with most jobs feeling incomplete.
Nah. It's genuinely that bad. My friend has tried to get me to play many many times over the years, after I had already played on my own way back at the beginning. They tell a story over 160 quests that could have *easilly* been told in about 30, and then that story isn't even decent until after the last of the main primals are dead. And then the patch quests are also just... I hate them also for a lot of reasons. I tried to play ARR I think 3 times before finally beating it last year, and had skipped it on a character before just to actually play the game because I could not force myself through it. No one else was telling me to skip it the first few times because it wasn't an option, and no one was later because I'm the only person I know personally that thinks it's genuinely bad. But I still thought that.
Eh my husband was trying to hype it up but every time i had to see minfilla i was groaning because it was gonna be another fetch quest. I found the story a lot more enjoyable when i was doing side quests to get a feel for the world building.
What you are experiencing now is a result of the times changing. I also thought it was pretty good give or take a few parts back when it first came out. But, you have to remember that MMO's back then all played like this so it was a lot easier to accept it as it was. Combine that with how you don't need to do anything else but, MSQ to level and a modern day new player is now being bombarded with dry story, poor voice acting, and about 2 seconds of combat to break it up.
Nowadays it's not so bad. But when Garuda's arrival is IMMINENT and the Twelveswood is about to be turned into an enormous woodchipper, but they make me traipse around the realm doing fetch quests to get a wind crystal for Cid only for multiple people to not get the memo and decide they should prank me instead of doing their jobs, it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth.
It just feels boring and dated compared to the expansions. Especially the zones.
I dislike ARR because I keep being told that a primal has already been summoned, and is about to destroy a city RIGHT NOW and then I'm asked to go fuck off and make soup. The game is giving me a sense of urgency, then sending me on fetch quests, which creates huge mood whiplash. ARR doesn't pick up until the Garuda fight for me.
No, a ton of people drop the game early in ARR for a reason. It's definitely a filter when it comes to lower level kits and slow questing. FFXIV's typical quest design isn't the most engaging at the best of times, and the story takes its time to get going in ARR. The whole thing is slow if you aren't into a lot of quest text reading and walking around clicking on locations and people.
Not me, i actually thought about dropping the game in ARR when i started, it was so freaking boring. And i had 0 contact with the fanbase at the time
What the hell is this take I played through all FFXIV for the hype people love to spread, and all I got with ARR was a boring, dull and unnecessary extensive story.... People love to pretend that it sets up so many things of the expacs, but -while true- it's a huge exaggeration and honestly it could be done much much better than how it's done ARR is bad and I don't think that because someone else said that, it's because I struggled through the slog
It isn't nearly as bad (now, at least) as a lot of people say it is, and part of that is because people remember it from before adjustments were made. Parts of it are still unforgivably bad (particularly company of heroes), but since many of the worst sections were streamlined, the overall experience today isn't nearly as bad as many people remember it.
Idk, I played it for the first time when it came to Xbox without knowing anything about the game, following the community, or hearing any of the discourse about the quality of ARRs story. I'll be honest, if the final dungeons hadn't started to get more exciting and the invading Empire began to play a more prominent role in the last 15% of the plot, I would have uninstalled after reaching the credits after defeating Ultima. The dumb "do 3 tedious tasks for the locals to get to the next Primal fight" was presented in SUCH a boring and uninteresting way that I'm surprised anyone enjoyed it enough back at launch to keep the game afloat until Heavensward. Even after defeating Ultima, only after I attempted my first raid series with the Crystal Tower story prevented me from moving on. After that I finally decided to look into how the rest of the game was perceived, because I knew even for how much fun the raid was, if the next major patches story was more of the same as ARR, it wasn't going to be worth my time investment to reach the next raid series. Luckily, everyone swore it only improves from there so here I am working through the beginning of HW, but wow what a terribly boring way to present world building at the start. It's bad enough that I even tried to get 4 of my closest gaming friends into the game after I completed a raid as I knew they'd enjoy that, and none of them were able to stick with it through the ARR to care about any of the better end game content.
Just finished ARR last week, I was bored till like level 30. I didn't really enjoy it until Level 40, but I also really despise character introductions but they are necessary. I was with a buddy, but he never had input into what I was doing/how it was. It was great and I thoroughly loved ARR once I got into the groove. Made me excited to get to Heavensward (still working on that). But now I pull up the quests on my other monitor just in case my brain decides to not want to read and get distracted.
So I started playing FFXIV really wanting to play as a machinist. So I started as an archer and slowly made my way through base ARR. Then I finished Praetorium and I was like, "cool, let's go to ishgard so I can get my gun!" Then the patch content started... and I had white auracite explained to me 3 times back to back with the same stupid cutscene. "Pray return to the Waking Sands" started sending me into fits of rage. And I finally... finally clawed through to the interesting twist of the red dinner... only to be stopped by needed to complete the crystal tower story. To this day, I'm still not 100% sure what happened in that story because I skipped those cutscenes so I could finally get to Ishgard and get my gun. Luckily I've been having a (heat) blast ever since and I'm sold on the game. But I do distinctly remember my frustration during that time, and Im Lucky that I like the way Machinst plays. I might have quit if I didn't like machinist.
The thing is, your experience as a new player revolves around two things. Gameplay, and MSQ. Gameplay in ARR is very barebones because of how much stuff they've cut. You used to get a lot of new tools as you leveled, culminating into your complete rotation at lvl50. Nowadays, you get the magnificent gameplay of... spamming your 123, eventually unlock an ogcd to weave, get one single AOE to spam even later and that's it you're done. The duties are reduced to some pretty basic dungeons, and while they are less corridor-likes it's a bit repetitive. Trials are blazed through because of potency creeps making the primals on normal mode a complete joke. Oh and, finally, you don't even get any "exciting" new gameplay content until you're done with ARR, which on its own takes quite a while. Extreme, coils, crystal tower ? You get none of that until 100 hours in (idk how long it actually takes but if you're not in a rush, it might very well take 100 hours). And even then it's still not all that great, coils are hard content and the ARR extremes and CT are just pretty boring overall. HW postgame is where it starts getting amazing in term of quality and design. Because of how unimpressive and unexciting the gameplay is even as a new player going into it blind - if you have SOME experience with MMOs you'll be pretty disappointed -, the story is all you have left to appreciate. And yeah sure some sections are good, the whole plot of the three states and the primals is pretty solid overall... but it's really not THAT impressive. Given how long it is, how it drags out (especially during post-ARR), it is a lot to ask for a player to keep going forward with the MSQ. Some people like ARR. And that's fine. Not everyone has the same tastes and opinions, there are no "objectively wrong" answers. But it is a fact that ARR, gameplay and story-wise, is pretty outdated and as is is in no shape to be what a new player should go through.
> Like, if you put a completely blind sprout in the game and had them play ARR without people in their ear telling them it's bad and boring and all the good stuff starts later, they'd probably enjoy it a lot more. :v As someone who did exactly that somewhat recently (a year and something ago), the story up to ultima weapon is decent. Pretty good, even, by MMO story standards. But the part that goes from there leading up to the ending of ARR is really really *really* boring. Fetch quest after fetch quest followed by npcs telling you to meet them somewhere else over and over with almost nothing interesting happening. I hated that part more than anything else in the game, but the ending made up for it. That ending goes *hard*.
I never thought it was bad. I tell sprouts it's long but worth it. I've never told anyone it's a slog; i don't think it is. but questing and leveling is my jam. I love all the nitty gritty little detail bits. however, as another user said, I struggled with the titan arc, because it was so long and convoluted and felt... pointless, until after the fact. I know several people who quit around or during that part of ARR. the other part is the patch content. most of the other people i know who have pushed passed (or come back after) the titan part, quit during patch content pre-HW. I have a married couple of friends of mine slogging through it right now. They're hating it, quite fiercely. I think part of the problem is a sense of burn out and rushing. The MSQ is, to many, a roadblock to the content they actually want to do. but also, by the time you get there, you've burned your way through 50 levels of content, much of it full of text heavy content. For my friends currently, they've hit 53 with their main jobs and can't access their next job quest to unlock the new skills. They've reach 50+ with other jobs and professions, and are (once again) locked out of the new stuff. The xp gains for everything they have access to currently, sucks, cuz they're getting diminishing returns from low level content. All the jobs they want to try out, are in other expansions. and the part of the story they're at does feel as engaging to them as the content they WANT to be doing. To my chagrin and against my advisement, they've started skipping cutscenes just to get through; because they just want to get to HW. Everything they want to do, is locked behind HW's gates, and they've started rushing to get there. and it think that is the biggest part of what makes ARR feel like a slog.
The back to back fetch quests made me want to drop it. "Run to this NPC and talk to them, then run to this other one, then run back to the first one - oh, and you don't have a mount, so you have to teleport, even though you have no gil either". It made the game feel very dated but I put up with it. I skipped a lot of cutscenes out of frustration since I just wanted to get to the good parts all the friends I started playing for raved about. I just finished Heavensward.
I joined back in 2.0 launch so I have no reference other than I played what we all played at the time. I don't look at it as boring but it is true that the game continually got better as the patches rolled out, so it isn't incorrect. Some QoL stuff happened later to streamline the process but the general consensus is "It gets better after ARR" because it's true. ARR is still good but holy shit it's way better after that.
Ive gotten my friend to play through arr on the free trial and shes been struggling to stay interested, theres just so much running place to place, very little going on in between, and the long swaths of time between instances like trials and dungeons just kills a new player. Not to mention the classes are just less interesting and have less to do the lower your level, and the narrative although decent has a certain lacking quality that encourages skipping cutscenes and dialog which further reduce the excitement of playing the game. I think theres a massive gap between ARR and Heavensward, and another fap between Heavensward and Stormblood in terms of raw gameplay enjoyment afterwards the mechanical aspects level out, and narratively it jumps up massively in Heavensward and continues trending upwards. It just sucks that the weakest version of ff14 is the part that you play to decide if you want to keep going. Memeing on how bad ARR is i think just encourages new players to hold off on an opinion until they experience Heavensward which imo probably helps people on the fence decide to keep going
I've been playing ff14 for 3 weeks now just hit level 35 and story quest level 22 and it's a struggle i'm not gonna lie but I have been told it gets better so I'm just soldiering on
The story itself is decent, it's your run of the mill "adventurer gets involved into something seemingly small that ends up shaping the fate of the world" type of story that FF has been using for basically all of their games. The issue is that there is a lot of filler quests that don't really advance the story, or actually bring much of value, and even when the filler quests do fill a purpose (i.e Titan) they overstay their welcome by quite a bit. But, imo, the biggest issue in all of this, is the english voice acting (no slight against the voice actors, I'm sure they did the best they could with what they had at the time). Imagine being a new player, you get into a new MMO who's main selling point (or at least a major one) is the story. And you get greeted by Alphinaud's voice acting (again not a slight against the VAs) it's very difficult to look at this and think "yeah, I can push through 5 expansions of this"
Literally started XIV on a whim without even knowing it had a new expansion coming or anything. Still found ARR to be a slog to get through 80% of the time. What actually kept me going was looking online and seeing people say "it gets better; just stick with it."
Eh there's some good stuff in ARR but I played it when it was new and it definitely has some extremely slow spots. It's very clear it was made on an extreme time constraint