This post is like a grab-bag of a number of scattered thoughts I got from playing the 1-50 journey, I hope it will be still readable (it's not). Consider that I'm going through the game specifically because I want to play the "unabridged" version of pre-Heavensward, so I'll spend the month of June trying to get to the end of the post-AAR. In my experience pretty much every single attempt to update old content ends up making it worse (an example is Phantasy Star Online 2, that I don't think can be defined other than "butchered"). I have no reason to think the update in FFXIV coming in 2.3 will be bad, but I still want to see how it is right now, especially because I enjoy the flavor and sidetracks.
Right now the 1-50 journey wasn't bad, but for example I think some of the more interesting moments were in the side stories, optional quests and some of that flavor, rather than the major story beats that are often very common and trope-y. So I'm even more determined to play all the content that is offered, rather than rushing as fast as possible, and wished I knew the precise day of the patch to plan things accordingly.
Before I lose everyone's attention I want to get to the point I'm more interested to read people's opinions about: the last few story parts concluding 2.0 were really, REALLY bad. But I'll have to draw a distinction, between story and gameplay.
I know the story doesn't "get good" until at least 2.4, so I'm aware I'm commenting this slow-burn introduction. It is overall an okay story, that is almost a fan-service to all previous FF games, with plenty of classic symbols, from crystal, to primals and magitek armor. It feels like a compendium of FF rather than its own thing, if a little insipid, but I appreciate this. It's a meta-FF. But at the same time the story doesn't really offer anything new or special, it's the average of the trope, and it's neither good nor bad. It is well written, though. And at various points it also has some subtlety and nuance.
...Leading up to the first problem/comment I have about the ending. It's curious how in the middle of the mission I got treated to a really interesting dialogue with Gaius... only to end up getting funneled, after the "victory", to an ENDLESS STREAM OF POINTLESS RHETORIC. The effect of all this is probably the very opposite the writers intended: what Gaius said was way more reasonable (a good portion of it) than the shallow rhetoric that comes from the "good guys". He explained how the people of Eorzea always expected the gods to solve their problems, always at the mercy of greater powers, and that instead for once they should come forward and take things in their hands, be responsible for something, take a goddamn active role instead of just pray someone else to come and fix everything for them. It's an hymn to rationality and change of the status quo, bring change rather than hope for it. He even explains a problem of democracy, always waiting either for a savior or a scapegoat to blame, always relying on what's convenient or comforting, what people want to hear rather than what's true, making things progressively worse instead of better. Of course the character is "bad", so along with all the subtlety there's also plenty that is outright stereotypically bad. But the character had some depth, and this depth is faced by the complete shallowness of the good guys. There are some decent good aspects even on this side, there's plenty about a positive message of integration and diversity. But that's about it. The bad guy spoke more rationally and earnestly than every other character in the game. And I got a little bit of interesting story in the middle of the final mission, just before everything got swept by anti-climactic rhetoric.
Leading this time to the gameplay problem. The last three group missions were ABYSMAL. The very worst the game had to offer to this point. In fact I see a pattern. This is a list of content I've done that was absolutely terrible:
- Solemn Trinity, the level 40 Guildhest
- Operation Archon
- Rock the Castrum
- The Ultimate Weapon
See a pattern? They are all "full party" activities, 8 players rather than the usual 4. This is why I'm worried, because every single time I got in this type of activity, the gameplay was an atrocity.
What's wrong? The same that is wrong in similar games, like Destiny 2 or Warframe. What's wrong is that these aren't interesting PvE encounters, they are wacky races. A variation on Super Mario Kart.
With Operation Archon I got a long cutscene, before and after. With an anti-climatic 10-seconds fight in the middle that was over before I could cast a single spell. I couldn't even SEE the enemy because all there was on screen was a lump of overlapping character models meleeing the poor lad. But of course, the boss was basically dead before I was out of the cutscene.
That's why the last two quests bring a change: now the cutscenes cannot be skipped.
Is it any better? Nope, it's worse, and some of the worst I've seen in any game. So now cutscenes cannot be skipped, and they aren't even just before and after the fact, but they get distributed through the whole mission so that it takes almost an hour. And it's one giant clusterfuck because it ends up like this: a few minutes cutscene -> 20 second race from point A to point B -> cutscene -> race -> cutscene. Because these tiny "gameplay bursts" aren't even necessary, you don't even need to kill the enemies because the thing is built so you simply need to hit the next checkpoint. So I was there watching what amounted to a jerk train, everyone running to the next checkpoint with a group of enemies trailing comically behind. Such climatic conclusion! Such drama! Of course there are also the unskippable bosses. I was healer. I don't know what I was supposed to do most of the times, but the bottom line is that it wasn't needed. You might think it was the other healer doing a good job while I was there looking dumb, but nope. In a couple of fights the other healer wasn't even there, because she died during one of those races and was still trying to catch up. The point is, in pretty much in all the fights of these last two missions healing isn't even necessary. I don't know why, but these four 8-player missions are balanced to be way, WAY easier than everything else in the game up to this point. Even the FIRST level 16 dungeon requires more effort and mindful approach than the last mission with the Omega Weapon. Who has designed this? From the "race to the next checkpoint", to the final showdown with main antagonists that had a build up of a hundred of hours, only to go down in a cheesy fight where I blinked once and the guy was already dead. The multi-phase Ultima Weapon fight was: 5-minutes bombastic cutscene > 30-seconds gameplay slap in the face > 5-minutes cutscene > 30-seconds gameplay slap. WTF? How can anyone think this is an acceptable way to do things?
(I also omitted the fact that at one point I saw everyone with the cutscene icon over their head, but not me. I was there, waiting without an idea of what to do. I tried clicking on a magitek armor that was there in front of everyone, and it said "access denied". So I asked in chat. Someone told me I had to take the lift to go downstairs again, click on a console, take the lift back up, click again on the thing. So by the time I was through this process everyone else was already two steps ahead. I was alone in an area with no exits. After some time a checkpoint appeared and I was eventually teleported to the main party. Almost all the times during the mission there were either missing or dead players, because everyone was running ahead without a care in the world. This is really some of the worst game design I've ever seen.)
So I was worried because I expected these full party activities being harder, more complex, require better attention, be more memorable. It was exactly the opposite: poorly designed, anticlimactic fights, cheesy, and trivially easy. The worst the game offered up to this point. And some really bad choices on how to narrate this part of the story.
It's also a common problem. I've read in the other thread that also the rest of the content was made "easier", because of all the tweaks to the gameplay and classes. The game moves forward and improves, but in the process the older parts always lose something. I'm sure that even if 5.3 brings good changes, something will still be sacrificed. Bad behaviours seep in.
The same it happens in Destiny 2, Warframe, even Diablo, where enemies are more annoyances to slow you down rather than fun-to-play encounters that you learn to deal with. In Warframe you literally skip the enemies by flying right through the place to reach the objective. It's not the way speedrunners break the game, it's how it's designed to be. For me, this destroys my fun and will to play. What's even the point of a "dungeon" if I can run right through it and grab the reward at the end? If the last room is all that matters then just give me the last room.
There is always a breaking point with online games, when the game designer just gives up and doesn't give a fuck: The exploit isn't anymore a bug, it becomes the standard. It's not even exclusive to online games, From Software is filled of examples. Almost half is skill, the other half is knowledge of glitches and exploits, and limits of the engine. Is an enemy falling to its death an artifact of poor AI and buggy pathing, or was it intended as a weakness to use? Probably we will never know. And that's why Sekiro and Bloodborne become better games: because more constraints on player's freedom lead to tighter encounter design. An encounter that plays closer to how it was intended, without letting you take a detour around that difficulty through a cheesy build or a trick or a glitch.
All this leading to another of my concerns: through ARR I levelled two classes, Bard and White Mage, specifically to AVOID outlevelling content. I was using the WHM to get groups quickly in dungeons, and was switching between classes whenever I happened to move ahead. It worked pretty well.
I have a new problem now (beside the horrifying news that now quests are gated by item level, but lets not go there): I started the penultimate quest with my WHM freshly leveled up to 50. Those last two quests alone, with zero rest bonus or other buffs, already put me at level 51. Now I have another 100 quests of post ARR. I've seen these new quests give very little experience, but I'm sure that by the time I'll reach HW I'll be way overleveled again. So I don't know WTF I should do, having these two goals: (1) doing post-ARR at the proper level (2) start HW at the proper level.
(also, why is post-ARR so dreaded? Because I'm sure I'm missing something. 100 quests would normally fly very quickly if there's no gating. Am I going to have to grind for equipment? Are there sidetracks that stretch this journey?)
For HW it probably might be a good idea to level up a DK from 30 to 50, so that I can play HW fresh with that, maybe switching to WHM when I go into a dungeon. But WTF does happen with 2.0 > 2.5? Can I use bard for questing, with the hope it won't let me outlevel things, while I use my WHM as a "dump" for all the excess of quest xp points and dungeons? Why these games don't create stricter caps so that they stay fun to play without forcing me to architect ways to stay at the proper level? (In Destiny 2 I had to deliberately lower my item level to keep the missions fun to play and not become another trivial race, option that was then even removed when they forced everyone to the level cap, making all story content stupid easy with no option to salvage it, gone, dead, buried, only a memory for those players who got to play it, and no way for new ones to ever see it the way it was intended)
That's my whole point through all this rambling post: everything deteriorates. Content is rushed through, experience rewards get increased again and again, characters become always more powerful and enemies always weaker. Good games become shit because of this. There's a widening rift between popular content that is constantly trivialized into nothing, and meaningful "raid" content that is inaccessible for most players. The day this gap opens too wide, the game dies (of a very slow death). It happens to all of them, from World of Warcraft to Destiny 2. They all get progressively easier to lure players through shallow rewards. Content that was once pretty fun is trivialized to the point is becomes just a pointless chore, but players will blame its "age", rather than poor design that messes up what was working. They shower you with easier rewards until no value exists anymore. New players arrive and find content that has deteriorated not because it's "old", but because it has been misshaped by years of bad behaviors.
5.3 might make things flow better, but I'm quite sure it will also make things meaningless. It will shove in your face tons of XP, make you even more horribly overleveled and over equipped, encourage to rush through everything. The hope is to cut this early weaker part, sure, but I'm certain it will still lose something in the process, and from that day it won't be available anymore in its original form. In fact some of it is gone already, but I don't know because I wasn't there. FOMO.
This because I'm sure those last two quests, when they were originally released, weren't THAT bad. Now they are, and I got what I got. Squaresoft will go back and make things faster. But they won't go back and make things better. No one does that. If you ask me, making these quests better would be much more important than make them faster.
TL;DR
Make things better, don't make them just faster.
Right now the 1-50 journey wasn't bad, but for example I think some of the more interesting moments were in the side stories, optional quests and some of that flavor, rather than the major story beats that are often very common and trope-y. So I'm even more determined to play all the content that is offered, rather than rushing as fast as possible, and wished I knew the precise day of the patch to plan things accordingly.
Before I lose everyone's attention I want to get to the point I'm more interested to read people's opinions about: the last few story parts concluding 2.0 were really, REALLY bad. But I'll have to draw a distinction, between story and gameplay.
I know the story doesn't "get good" until at least 2.4, so I'm aware I'm commenting this slow-burn introduction. It is overall an okay story, that is almost a fan-service to all previous FF games, with plenty of classic symbols, from crystal, to primals and magitek armor. It feels like a compendium of FF rather than its own thing, if a little insipid, but I appreciate this. It's a meta-FF. But at the same time the story doesn't really offer anything new or special, it's the average of the trope, and it's neither good nor bad. It is well written, though. And at various points it also has some subtlety and nuance.
...Leading up to the first problem/comment I have about the ending. It's curious how in the middle of the mission I got treated to a really interesting dialogue with Gaius... only to end up getting funneled, after the "victory", to an ENDLESS STREAM OF POINTLESS RHETORIC. The effect of all this is probably the very opposite the writers intended: what Gaius said was way more reasonable (a good portion of it) than the shallow rhetoric that comes from the "good guys". He explained how the people of Eorzea always expected the gods to solve their problems, always at the mercy of greater powers, and that instead for once they should come forward and take things in their hands, be responsible for something, take a goddamn active role instead of just pray someone else to come and fix everything for them. It's an hymn to rationality and change of the status quo, bring change rather than hope for it. He even explains a problem of democracy, always waiting either for a savior or a scapegoat to blame, always relying on what's convenient or comforting, what people want to hear rather than what's true, making things progressively worse instead of better. Of course the character is "bad", so along with all the subtlety there's also plenty that is outright stereotypically bad. But the character had some depth, and this depth is faced by the complete shallowness of the good guys. There are some decent good aspects even on this side, there's plenty about a positive message of integration and diversity. But that's about it. The bad guy spoke more rationally and earnestly than every other character in the game. And I got a little bit of interesting story in the middle of the final mission, just before everything got swept by anti-climactic rhetoric.
Leading this time to the gameplay problem. The last three group missions were ABYSMAL. The very worst the game had to offer to this point. In fact I see a pattern. This is a list of content I've done that was absolutely terrible:
- Solemn Trinity, the level 40 Guildhest
- Operation Archon
- Rock the Castrum
- The Ultimate Weapon
See a pattern? They are all "full party" activities, 8 players rather than the usual 4. This is why I'm worried, because every single time I got in this type of activity, the gameplay was an atrocity.
What's wrong? The same that is wrong in similar games, like Destiny 2 or Warframe. What's wrong is that these aren't interesting PvE encounters, they are wacky races. A variation on Super Mario Kart.
With Operation Archon I got a long cutscene, before and after. With an anti-climatic 10-seconds fight in the middle that was over before I could cast a single spell. I couldn't even SEE the enemy because all there was on screen was a lump of overlapping character models meleeing the poor lad. But of course, the boss was basically dead before I was out of the cutscene.
That's why the last two quests bring a change: now the cutscenes cannot be skipped.
Is it any better? Nope, it's worse, and some of the worst I've seen in any game. So now cutscenes cannot be skipped, and they aren't even just before and after the fact, but they get distributed through the whole mission so that it takes almost an hour. And it's one giant clusterfuck because it ends up like this: a few minutes cutscene -> 20 second race from point A to point B -> cutscene -> race -> cutscene. Because these tiny "gameplay bursts" aren't even necessary, you don't even need to kill the enemies because the thing is built so you simply need to hit the next checkpoint. So I was there watching what amounted to a jerk train, everyone running to the next checkpoint with a group of enemies trailing comically behind. Such climatic conclusion! Such drama! Of course there are also the unskippable bosses. I was healer. I don't know what I was supposed to do most of the times, but the bottom line is that it wasn't needed. You might think it was the other healer doing a good job while I was there looking dumb, but nope. In a couple of fights the other healer wasn't even there, because she died during one of those races and was still trying to catch up. The point is, in pretty much in all the fights of these last two missions healing isn't even necessary. I don't know why, but these four 8-player missions are balanced to be way, WAY easier than everything else in the game up to this point. Even the FIRST level 16 dungeon requires more effort and mindful approach than the last mission with the Omega Weapon. Who has designed this? From the "race to the next checkpoint", to the final showdown with main antagonists that had a build up of a hundred of hours, only to go down in a cheesy fight where I blinked once and the guy was already dead. The multi-phase Ultima Weapon fight was: 5-minutes bombastic cutscene > 30-seconds gameplay slap in the face > 5-minutes cutscene > 30-seconds gameplay slap. WTF? How can anyone think this is an acceptable way to do things?
(I also omitted the fact that at one point I saw everyone with the cutscene icon over their head, but not me. I was there, waiting without an idea of what to do. I tried clicking on a magitek armor that was there in front of everyone, and it said "access denied". So I asked in chat. Someone told me I had to take the lift to go downstairs again, click on a console, take the lift back up, click again on the thing. So by the time I was through this process everyone else was already two steps ahead. I was alone in an area with no exits. After some time a checkpoint appeared and I was eventually teleported to the main party. Almost all the times during the mission there were either missing or dead players, because everyone was running ahead without a care in the world. This is really some of the worst game design I've ever seen.)
So I was worried because I expected these full party activities being harder, more complex, require better attention, be more memorable. It was exactly the opposite: poorly designed, anticlimactic fights, cheesy, and trivially easy. The worst the game offered up to this point. And some really bad choices on how to narrate this part of the story.
It's also a common problem. I've read in the other thread that also the rest of the content was made "easier", because of all the tweaks to the gameplay and classes. The game moves forward and improves, but in the process the older parts always lose something. I'm sure that even if 5.3 brings good changes, something will still be sacrificed. Bad behaviours seep in.
The same it happens in Destiny 2, Warframe, even Diablo, where enemies are more annoyances to slow you down rather than fun-to-play encounters that you learn to deal with. In Warframe you literally skip the enemies by flying right through the place to reach the objective. It's not the way speedrunners break the game, it's how it's designed to be. For me, this destroys my fun and will to play. What's even the point of a "dungeon" if I can run right through it and grab the reward at the end? If the last room is all that matters then just give me the last room.
There is always a breaking point with online games, when the game designer just gives up and doesn't give a fuck: The exploit isn't anymore a bug, it becomes the standard. It's not even exclusive to online games, From Software is filled of examples. Almost half is skill, the other half is knowledge of glitches and exploits, and limits of the engine. Is an enemy falling to its death an artifact of poor AI and buggy pathing, or was it intended as a weakness to use? Probably we will never know. And that's why Sekiro and Bloodborne become better games: because more constraints on player's freedom lead to tighter encounter design. An encounter that plays closer to how it was intended, without letting you take a detour around that difficulty through a cheesy build or a trick or a glitch.
All this leading to another of my concerns: through ARR I levelled two classes, Bard and White Mage, specifically to AVOID outlevelling content. I was using the WHM to get groups quickly in dungeons, and was switching between classes whenever I happened to move ahead. It worked pretty well.
I have a new problem now (beside the horrifying news that now quests are gated by item level, but lets not go there): I started the penultimate quest with my WHM freshly leveled up to 50. Those last two quests alone, with zero rest bonus or other buffs, already put me at level 51. Now I have another 100 quests of post ARR. I've seen these new quests give very little experience, but I'm sure that by the time I'll reach HW I'll be way overleveled again. So I don't know WTF I should do, having these two goals: (1) doing post-ARR at the proper level (2) start HW at the proper level.
(also, why is post-ARR so dreaded? Because I'm sure I'm missing something. 100 quests would normally fly very quickly if there's no gating. Am I going to have to grind for equipment? Are there sidetracks that stretch this journey?)
For HW it probably might be a good idea to level up a DK from 30 to 50, so that I can play HW fresh with that, maybe switching to WHM when I go into a dungeon. But WTF does happen with 2.0 > 2.5? Can I use bard for questing, with the hope it won't let me outlevel things, while I use my WHM as a "dump" for all the excess of quest xp points and dungeons? Why these games don't create stricter caps so that they stay fun to play without forcing me to architect ways to stay at the proper level? (In Destiny 2 I had to deliberately lower my item level to keep the missions fun to play and not become another trivial race, option that was then even removed when they forced everyone to the level cap, making all story content stupid easy with no option to salvage it, gone, dead, buried, only a memory for those players who got to play it, and no way for new ones to ever see it the way it was intended)
That's my whole point through all this rambling post: everything deteriorates. Content is rushed through, experience rewards get increased again and again, characters become always more powerful and enemies always weaker. Good games become shit because of this. There's a widening rift between popular content that is constantly trivialized into nothing, and meaningful "raid" content that is inaccessible for most players. The day this gap opens too wide, the game dies (of a very slow death). It happens to all of them, from World of Warcraft to Destiny 2. They all get progressively easier to lure players through shallow rewards. Content that was once pretty fun is trivialized to the point is becomes just a pointless chore, but players will blame its "age", rather than poor design that messes up what was working. They shower you with easier rewards until no value exists anymore. New players arrive and find content that has deteriorated not because it's "old", but because it has been misshaped by years of bad behaviors.
5.3 might make things flow better, but I'm quite sure it will also make things meaningless. It will shove in your face tons of XP, make you even more horribly overleveled and over equipped, encourage to rush through everything. The hope is to cut this early weaker part, sure, but I'm certain it will still lose something in the process, and from that day it won't be available anymore in its original form. In fact some of it is gone already, but I don't know because I wasn't there. FOMO.
This because I'm sure those last two quests, when they were originally released, weren't THAT bad. Now they are, and I got what I got. Squaresoft will go back and make things faster. But they won't go back and make things better. No one does that. If you ask me, making these quests better would be much more important than make them faster.
TL;DR
Make things better, don't make them just faster.
Last edited:
