Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

[Brandy [◉'']]

A bit off-topic, but can someone explain to me what exactly people dislike about the Thirteenth arc so much? Is it just Zero being an annoying trope character?

The Arc was fine, started out really great with 6.1 and was interesting enough in 6.2. The trouble was that .3, .4 and .5 meandered around too much. With .2 we had this really cool setup in Zero's domain that we were able to explore the 13th from, but for some reason* we spent 3 patches travelling back to already known locations to teach Zero the power of friendship. It wasn't too bad, but there was no reason to involve the twins again... I remember thinking that Estinien and Y'shtola got to stay in the 13th and explore the place while we had to trundle around with Zero in the Source was a bit disappointing. During all of that Zero's shtick was worn fairly thin, like her tipping her head or not understanding the concept of friendship for the longest time. In general .2 onwards really felt like Hiroi was at the steering wheel, but since the story was more or less closed off, it was cool overall.

*it felt like a setup for exploration content like OC to be honest, but never came to be

 

[Rich Evans Ayypologist]

MMO gross sales decreased year over year by -23%

MMO operational profits by -45%

That's kindof wild. Q1 of 24 was the waiting-room end-of-expansion patch, with another whole quarter to go before DT's release. And people were still buying and spending and excited for this game. Dawntrail at its plateauing period is selling worse than Endwalker in its end-of-life stage.

A bit off-topic, but can someone explain to me what exactly people dislike about the Thirteenth arc so much? Is it just Zero being an annoying trope character?

Zero is emblematic of the issue - shoddy, terrible, boring writing and characterization. The trouble with the arc isn't so much its gist - even if I don't like it - but all of the Hiroi marks. The cutscenes are flat and boring and uninspired. The setpieces are uninteresting: an empty void, another moon, an empty void on the moon, all things that you could whip up in a jiffy. The characters speak in flat and uninteresting ways, and it's really not clear why 'scions breakin up' was even emphasized if half of them would still be hanging around.

But even beyond those aspects, it's just weak writing. The pacing is bad, scenes take too long, characters repeat things like you're a fucking retard (I do not care if this is some Japanese 'cultural quirk'), there's no real momentum and the stakes of 'I know reality was gonna end before, but this time it's REALLY gonna end' all combine to make it the worst inter-expansion story by a wide, wide margin. It also explained to us the conceit of Dawntrail in a lot of ways, because it took us back to Shadowbringers characters and locations... and did them worse, lobotomized them. Hiroi wanted the world to know he was gonna make a much-much cooler Shadowbringers. There's also the fact that it feels like a completely boxed segment: all the others ones filtered right into the story and were necessary setups for what-came-next. This one just kindof comes out of nowhere, gets dealt with, and then we forget about it so we can have a single patch of buildup for DT because they fucked up the pacing to fit the 13th arc.

 

[Baron Reginald]

Is it just Zero being an annoying trope character

Because it's a shallow repeat of FF4 directly, with a shitty OC donutsteel tier character addition. The entire arc was just a shallow plot contrivance to have the four fiends be the Trials.

It was content that usually would of been sidelined to the side content like the Weapons arc was in Shadowbringers, but was forced into the MSQ.


LIke, Zero is a major aspect of why I stopped giving a shit about 14 as a player. I hate the Anime reliance, I hate they are relying more and more on direct anime inspirations and visual styles, especially for DT. Even the newer models for enemies and the like are getting more and more anime, their eyes are literally getting bigger and bigger and it's jarring as hell.

 

[SnowBall]

The Arc was fine, started out really great with 6.1 and was interesting enough in 6.2. The trouble was that .3, .4 and .5 meandered around too much. With .2 we had this really cool setup in Zero's domain that we were able to explore the 13th from, but for some reason* we spent 3 patches travelling back to already known locations to teach Zero the power of friendship. It wasn't too bad, but there was no reason to involve the twins again... I remember thinking that Estinien and Y'shtola got to stay in the 13th and explore the place while we had to trundle around with Zero in the Source was a bit disappointing. During all of that Zero's shtick was worn fairly thin, like her tipping her head or not understanding the concept of friendship for the longest time. In general .2 onwards really felt like Hiroi was at the steering wheel, but since the story was more or less closed off, it was cool overall.

*it felt like a setup for exploration content like OC to be honest, but never came to be

The Zero arc should have been a separate trial series from the msq. The post EW patches felt like they were stretching a trial series out way too thin.

 

[Golfing on the Moon 1971]

A bit off-topic, but can someone explain to me what exactly people dislike about the Thirteenth arc so much?

The 13th would have made for visually spectacular high fantasy zones. Instead we just get a couple throwaway linear dungeons and that's it.

There is no tension as the water guy and Rubicante invade our world but don't kill anyone or wipe out any villages. The threat of a demon invasion at the end is flaccid as you know nothing will come of it. Going through the story at this point isn't exciting. You are just going through the motions.

Golbez gets turned into yet another JRPG dindu who gets let off the hook scot free. Inb4 someone brings up his circumstances and how "he had no choice" and blah blah but it's just part of an infuriating trend where the bad guys aren't allowed to be bad and get killed. Everyone has to have le tragic backstory and then we shake hands with them.

They rehashed ShB's ending where you run through the memory of the apocalypse while the villain narrates for the third time in a row.

Zero is whatever. Didn't care about her. Also too much obnoxious redditor fedora tipping.

 

[RIPRhongoBongo]

Welp, new patch means new crafting grind. Week 1 market boards are week 1 market boarding, so fuck buying any mats for the next few weeks

 

[SnowBall]

I'm just spamming scrip farming and gathering to get the crafting mats. Not looking forward to melding gear though.

 

[Fcret]

Getting me back to XIV would require the dev team acknowledging the deep problems with the gameplay loop and actually acting on it with some kind of urgency. Heavensward had absolutely broke-ass job design out of the gate and by the midway point it had been patched up enough to make way for Stormblood's overhauls.

Meanwhile we've had Shadowbringers gameplay for like 3 expansions now and they've only doubled-down on a lot of the things that people didn't like about Shadowbringers. And every time someone asks them if they could bring back *some* of the stuff (not all of it, just some) that was good about HW and SB job design, the devs act like you're a fucking crazy person. It's just "you think you do but you don't" smug horseshit, Japan-edition.

Also unpopular opinion - crafting and gathering need to feel important. Not just, "you buy the crafted gear at the start of the raid tier" or slutmogs for trannies. Crafters should be able to approach much closer to BiS (hell, just make near-BiS craftables expert crafts and non-tradeable) or have a role to play in relic quests or something. We also need more disciplines - where's the equivalent of enchanting? archaeology? inscription? engineering? All of those are cool-ass concepts for professions in WoW that could probably be a starting point to making cool cosmetic and fun collectible shit in XIV. Imagine being able to craft cosmetic skins for certain moves so you can be an ice-themed samurai or something, I dunno.

There's just nothing interesting. Gameplay loop is stale, I'm tired of playing DDR with retards over rural internet while hearing tranny vocal fry in my ear, and I'm tired of not having shit to do other than raid.

A bit off-topic, but can someone explain to me what exactly people dislike about the Thirteenth arc so much? Is it just Zero being an annoying trope character?
I thought the Arch-fiends were fun enough and I got a little invested in saving Azdaja. The common explanation I heard is that it felt pointless, but it's the first arc after EW and people seemed to agree that we wanted a shorter story with less stakes to reset things. I agree it needed more story hooks for the future. honestly it didn't feel much worse than previous patch cycles.

Also they take Calyx way too seriously when the idea of a hacker villain with an iPad in XIV is so fundamentally dumb. He really should've turned out to be an avatar for some fat nerd in a basement somewhere in Solution Nine using Replicant Sphene as a virtual GF before we kick his teeth in. But I guess you don't want to insult half the playerbase.

There's nothing really wrong with it but we went into it knowing that it was going to be glorified filler as the 13th is impossible to fix in main story due to the retarded decision to tie 13th characters into optional trials and optional high-level role quest completion. I saw it as a waste of time because nothing can be resolved so long as Unu and that brown elf bitch are trapped in the optional content freezer.

Also for the 13th being the core part of the storyline, we didn't see much of the 13th at all. Half of it took place on the source or "source but red."

Q1 financial report for Square Enix is out. Relevant slide is below:

View attachment 7757825

MMO gross sales decreased year over year by -23%, MMO operational profits by -45%. Dawntrail really shat the bed for them.

I wish they would just localize Dragon Quest X.