Final Fantasy XIV - Kiwi Free Company

I remember Final Fantasy XIV on launch back in 2010 being abject rubbish, and then coming back to it in 2018 adoring the shit out of my Marauder -> Warrior and Thief -> Ninja characters in A Realm Reborn... then I exhausted myself by the time Heavensward started and I just stopped caring. FF14 is honestly the most fun I ever had playing a (technically) mainline Final Fantasy game since OG FFX way back in my teen years. I wonder how my observations from back then hold up today?
a) Yeah Limsa is still full of the dancing catgirls and assorted gooners, the whole place is best avoided.

b) Brynhildr is on the Crystal cluster these days and (along with Coeurl) catches a lot of the overflow when Balmung and Mateus are closed, which basically means it's an open pit sewer. One of the less terrible ones on the DC in terms of player capability, though, going by their clear rates of endgame content being on the upper end for Crystal and about on par with the worse end of other DCs.

c) 4-man parties are just the default for most content because that's what they settled on, and the wait times are bad for DPS because tanking/healing in this game has a completely undeserved reputation for being "hard", so players flock to roles with less perceived responsibility and difficulty. This, combined with the fact that there's just a ton of different DPS roles to pick from, means there's consistently a surplus of DPS in any given queue and a shortage of T/H, which makes for long wait times on DPS.

d) The aesthetics themselves are a bit hit or miss (I like the architectural shapes and such of Ul'dah but wish it was a bit less... uniformly sand-colored) but I do like how all three of them have their own character and fit into their biomes. That's a thing I think they've generally been fairly good about - fitting places to their environs.

e) Yeah the story drags a lot, moreso in certain parts, but the real devil is that there's not a lot to do outside it. More or less everything is gated behind main story progression, and tbh the main story is the meat of the game anyways.
As for doing an ironman build in 14... it's possible, it wouldn't even be that hard, and because of that I don't think there'd be much of a point to it. An IM is fun in Runescape because it forces you to put serious effort and consideration into gearing, skill progression, etc when "just buy it on the GE" isn't an option for gear upgrades, quest items, etc.
OTOH there is basically no real gearing in XIV, the game literally just hands you stuff as you go all the way to max level, and even at max level the gear is functionally free. Which means you'd just be playing your IM build basically the same way as a regular account, which rather defeats the whole idea.

f) Yeah that thing never goes away. There's a setting you can toggle to hide it if you have hit the current end of the MSQ, but it comes back next patch.

g) Yeah this game has some fairly similar issues to RS3 when it comes to the button mashing stuff, mostly because both Jagex and SE are terrible at netcode and buttons are horribly responsive if you have any amount of ping at all. FWIW Ninja's been largely fixed though, moving mudras onto the GCD did a lot to fix the part where playing NIN at high level used to require living on the floor above the server farm and playing osu! for a living.

h) Yeah the botting is absolutely real. Crafting/gathering market stuff is basically completely busted and has been for years because SE does very little to nothing about people farming this stuff with gathering bots and autocrafter programs. The housing crisis is sorta real but not really (there's a lot of complaining about housing shortages but most servers have hundreds of open plots as things stand, even the most densely populated ones).
 
the real answer is Y'shtola or Thancred, Y'shtola because her blind aether eye strain was flagged forever ago as a possible issue, and Thancred because he's basically ran to the end of his natural progression.
Matoya never outright says Y'shtola would die of using Aether to see. In the Japanese version she says something akin to "Keeping that spell up will exhaust your body quickly" and exactly that is happening after every major encounter, where she is visibly winded. Koji just hammed it up a lot when he translated that line and people's interpretation did the rest.

Personally I hope no one of the Scions croaks. It is fine to have them sit out an expansion, or just go back to the ensemble cast either way I enjoy having them around as my adventuring group.

Fanfest seemed only positive news with the exception of the battle pass thing. That just looked weird. Job rework is cool, but for anyone wondering if they would enjoy it, I'd advise looking at VPR. It seems to be very close in mechanics on how the new Jobs play, as in fewer buttons, the filler combo is one button that evolved (well two really..) and your burst can be shifted around freely for 20 seconds.
 
So I guess FF14 Twitter is having a conversation about story skipping and speed running to the end game and I wanted to see what you're guys opinion on it was.

Screenshot_20260427-145439.pngScreenshot_20260427-145419.png
 
So I guess FF14 Twitter is having a conversation about story skipping and speed running to the end game and I wanted to see what you're guys opinion on it was.

View attachment 8923227View attachment 8923229
It's a retarded argument. I like story and enjoyed most of the story of FFXIV up until Dawntrail, but it's not like I expect everyone to pay attention to it. Some people want to get to max level and do the "end game". It's not like them skipping the story has affected my ability to enjoy the story. And at this point, yeah, it's pretty daunting to tell someone, "you have to go through around 300 hours of cutscenes in order to play with me". Evercold as has been said, in this thread, is the perfect time to just give a quick and dirty run down of "the story so far" and dump them in if they so choose, literally let people opt in to the long ass slog to Evercold. New Game+ exists if they want to go back and experience it. The only thing I dislike about this idea is how they handle all the instanced combat content that skips. Trials and even normal raids are already a pain from all the people that habitually eat paste making said content more of a chore than it should. For example, Zurvan has been a recurring thing in Trial roulette thanks to the mogtome event. I literally had a "mentor" tank stand there with Zurvan facing the party and hit us with multiple of Zurvan's conal cleaves. And then none of the paste eaters, that have been running the fucking thing for mog tomes can figure out the seal mech. So yeah, as someone that plays healer regularly to avoid queues, I'm not happy to deal with extra work from the submentals infesting roulette.
 
So I guess FF14 Twitter is having a conversation about story skipping and speed running to the end game and I wanted to see what you're guys opinion on it was.

View attachment 8923227View attachment 8923229
You're doing barely any different doing 3.0 content or doing 7.0 content.
Rushing to get to the endgame is a attitude carried over from other MMOs where anything but latest patch content is abandoned

 
So I guess FF14 Twitter is having a conversation about story skipping and speed running to the end game and I wanted to see what you're guys opinion on it was.

View attachment 8923227View attachment 8923229
I think its kinda retarded to necessarily rush to end game since its nothing too special, but how much or what you experience will depend on how much you like it, and depending on the player they might just not give a shit but still like the moment to moment and i think thats more than reasonable. Especially with DT's dogshit storyline and some of the post patch content being less than stellar
 
Have fun with all the quests where you don't play as your character.
Won't lie, I'm one of the minority of players who actually enjoyed the Metal Gear Thancred section and Freaky Friday in Endwalker. It was interesting to have a change of pace that actually challenged me to think a little different.

That said, I think maybe once or twice an expansion is probably my upper limit for that sort of thing. Beyond that it just starts to become tedious.
 
I didn’t even hear of this expansion being announced so I thought the evercold logo was fake. Looks more appealing than dawntrail but obviously it’s impossible to tell with a CGI trailer. It’s at the very least slightly better just by virtue of not having Wuk.
 
So I guess FF14 Twitter is having a conversation about story skipping and speed running to the end game and I wanted to see what you're guys opinion on it was.

View attachment 8923227View attachment 8923229
If you want to skip the story and raid, you should probably just play WoW because it's a much better game for that.

FFXIV works really well for what it is - a MMO with a decent JRPG story that you can kind of take at a slow pace. Once you start changing "what it is", it starts to lose it's identity and value. The story and things attached to it (setting, references to other games, music, and so on) do a lot of heavy lifting - and without it FFXIV kind of sucks. The final solo fight of Endwalker would make 0 sense and carry 0 weight if you just skipped into it, for example.

It's largely just the "Dark souls needs an easy mode" argument, but with Time instead of Skill as the limiter.

That all said - a lot of the "Evolved" talk in the most recent live letter ("Evolved" gameplay, the death of the 2 minute meta, the updates to character creation, the "Evolved" gameplay loop) really leads me to think that Fanfest2 or Fanfest3 will simply reveal a "Evolved" story for new players to get into Evercold, which will be the main story condensed into a much smaller package with a lot of the bloat skippable (or segmented into an optional "Reborn" path).

Time will tell, but, Fanfest 1 seemed like they were aware that they need to fix the game and with the push into Switch 2 (and after Xbox) new user onboarding has to be front-of-mind for them.
 
Won't lie, I'm one of the minority of players who actually enjoyed the Metal Gear Thancred section and Freaky Friday in Endwalker. It was interesting to have a change of pace that actually challenged me to think a little different.

That said, I think maybe once or twice an expansion is probably my upper limit for that sort of thing. Beyond that it just starts to become tedious.
Call me whatever but I fucking hated when I was forced to play as something other than my character to progress. None of them were hard but I just don't want to deal with it. If you do like variety this game especially makes it super easy to swap around.

I hated vehicle sections in WoW for the same reason.
 
Honestly the thing that makes me not mind the alternative gameplay sections is that you often just do them one and done in an MSQ that takes half an hour tops if you actually read, less if you dont give a shit, i understand the annoyance but it just kinda slips by for me
 
Won't lie, I'm one of the minority of players who actually enjoyed the Metal Gear Thancred section and Freaky Friday in Endwalker. It was interesting to have a change of pace that actually challenged me to think a little different.

That said, I think maybe once or twice an expansion is probably my upper limit for that sort of thing. Beyond that it just starts to become tedious.
I'm probably the only person who liked the Estenien solo from Shadowbringers. Though that one was ruined in retrospect when the fact that Garlemald was doing mad science with Ultima Weapons prototypes became a nothingburger when they cut out so much of the Garlemald stuff we were getting teased with.
 
I remember the old trick where you'd unequip like half your gear to fudge a low ilvl so you'd always get CT.

tbh - I don't think alliance raid roulette would be so miserable if the Shadowbringers ones weren't in the rotation. They're so fucking long for no reason.

So I guess FF14 Twitter is having a conversation about story skipping and speed running to the end game and I wanted to see what you're guys opinion on it was.

View attachment 8923227View attachment 8923229
My opinion is basically that if you're going to story skip you should just do it and accept that you're going to have to deal with a lot of catching up. The problem is that dudes who demand that they should be allowed to skip aren't asking for the functional means to skip (that already exists after all). What they want is asspats and seal claps and to not face even the tiniest bit of pushback for doing so, and they also want the game to cater to them by turning all the content into what WoW has morphed into (a story so disconnected from progression that no one knows wtf is going on).

In any case, I don't think it really matters. Most dudes who are jonesing to story skip aren't going to last in this game anyway. They'll buy their skip, progress WOW SHINY NEW EXPAC and then get filtered during their first solo duty or trial.

Also next hard-hitting opinion - I don't want streamers or e-celebs playing this game. The WoW exodus brought the worst fucking people into this game and the community hasn't recovered. It's unfortunate but if you don't do a bit of redlining the entire neighborhood will go to shit.

That all said - a lot of the "Evolved" talk in the most recent live letter ("Evolved" gameplay, the death of the 2 minute meta, the updates to character creation, the "Evolved" gameplay loop) really leads me to think that Fanfest2 or Fanfest3 will simply reveal a "Evolved" story for new players to get into Evercold, which will be the main story condensed into a much smaller package with a lot of the bloat skippable (or segmented into an optional "Reborn" path).
Honestly I'm surprised they haven't revealed that yet. Maybe they're still nervous about DT being the new 'entry point' or whatever due to how divisive it's been. That or they're waiting for when they squish levels in 9.0 to do it so they'll have a better idea of how character level will work with this whole thing.
 
Back
Top Bottom