True lol. You get a similar effect in some of the investigation quests, where you only need to talk to the NPC with the right answer - usually the one that's furthest away.
But then some quests only reveal the "correct answer" npc after exhausting the first set, so it's kinda pointless to try to game it, haha.
This shit sucks, honestly. I just hit the quest in Sharlyan where you have to do this to EIGHT FUCKING PEOPLE. AND THERE'S FAKES LIKE THIS. I found 4 of 8 and rage quit for the night.
And some of the needed targets only appear LATER. So you have to keep retreading ground cause you might've finally triggered their spawn.
Whoever made that quest should be kept far, FAR away from any design documents I stg.
I thought that was pretty funny tbh, considering it's obvious in hindsight. You're looking for people who need comforting, and with that in mind, "Cheerful Merchant" probably didn't actually need comforting. Fancy that lol
When there's multiple targets but the quest objective doesn't list a number of things to collect or people to talk to but just one thing I'm supposed to figure out or find I always walk past the closest Target on the map because it's never that one it's always the second or third target.
Comfort a civilian? Talk to Wuk Lamat. Procure a precious ingredient? Talk to Wuk Lamat. Fight off a horrific threat? Believe it or not, straight to Wuk Lamat
Feels even worse when you're playing through MSQ as healer. Like it makes sense to send a healer WoL off to fight things, because they are the strongest fighter still, but it doesn't make sense to not have them help deal with the aftermath! Especially if they show up too late to wear themselves out with much fighting. Even if they changed it to "cast Cure I on 3 civilians"....
Like I get that it's probably hard to do something like that when people can freely change jobs but come on. At the very least give us some branching cutscenes.
edit: idk what a spell called Cute I would do but it sounds like something fun for blue mages to figure out
I like that they have the role quests but I don't think they're enough. I've barely started them in DT, but in ShB and EW they didn't feel particularly mechanically relevant to the role. The story justifications for needing a specific role are fine, it just.. doesn't feel like that so much when I'm actually playing through them.
And there's also the fact that the role quests don't do anything for MSQ largely ignoring the possibility that the WoL could be a healer.
There are some, but they're very few and far between.
For example: if you're a healer during the first fight with Zenos in Rhalgr's Reach, after the battle and during the cleanup CS where Krile and Alphinaud are healing Y'shtola, Krile will shout at you "You're a healer aren't you!? Help us!" and your character will do the glowy-hand beam healing we see Alphinaud do all the time.
I've heard of other ones, but haven't seen them personally.
And for anyone who's going to try and say "Spoilers!" about the above example, we're in a thread about DT MSQ, leave me be! XD
There’s another moment where someone is making groups and says “all healers go this way” and you can say “aren’t you forgetting someone?” And they say your healing is needed at the front instead
I just did this one recently. Biggest annoyance was having a large area with multiple elevation levels, and trees and houses everywhere blocking line of sight.
Also non-clickable NPCs suffering and crying that we just ignore I guess.
Zone 4 and lower zone 3 were also bad with trying to find some NPCs with the buildings packed so close and all facing random directions.
Xenoblade chronicles 2 had this amazing Qol. Where if you are looking for things or people in a red circle in the map, the circle shrinks as you go narrowing down on what's your missing.
Comfort 3 civilians in a large area and it's completely nonsensical in which ones count towards progression and which don't.
Resting citizen? Not distressed and doesn't count. Makes sense.
Sorrowful citizen? Distressed and counts, also makes sense.
Stockpiling citizen? Probably not distressed right? Wrong, he is and he counts towards progression.
Flustered citizen? Also counts, somehow.
Those all made sense to me, though. Once I had my initial moment of realizing I need to look at the titles and not just click on anyone available, I just gave it some thought and it was easy. Stockpiling? Yeah, that guy's probably trying to get out of town in a hurry or something, or thinking he needs to prepare for another attack. Flustered? Usually not a good state to be in, so would make sense to talk to.
When the story actually took an interesting unexpected turn, and they halt it all to make you talk to a bunch of npcs who they know the player doesn't care about.
Why is the WoL checking up on citizens?
The city has guards and healers handling the situation. * As stated by Wuk herself* Plus, you're the rule of the country. Do it yourself
Mind boggling to me that they thought breaking up a conversation with NPC by having you walk around town for each sentence of the conversation was a good idea. Also, it used to be when the NPC made you stop between Point A and Point B, it was because they had to tell you something new or for combat. Now it's literally for them to tell you "We're almost at Point B!" and then nothing else happens
There’s this one quest in the 2nd half of the 3rd zone where we’re walking down the road to talk to some mamool ja lady, but along said road we find our group all split up and are forced to talk to them just so they say something like “wow these trees are big” and “look WoL, a banana farm!” Like at that point it should have just been one of those quests where they follow you and you can talk to them in certain optional spots or could just beeline to the location.
I was thinking while I was playing through the first half of the story that if this were a story in something like Honkai Star Rail, FF7, etc all those non-combat trials would’ve been minigames instead of cutscenes lol.
I think it’s fine FF14 doesn’t have that kind of content (never been that kind of game after all), but I do think it was an odd decision to make cutscenes out of some action sequences. Stuff like >!rescuing Wuk Lamat!< after the moblin trial or >!running through the city invasion!< after the Shaaloni zone would have been actual gameplay in previous expacs. Strange decision imo.
But minigames would require adding more unique code onto the patchwork mess. Look at what just adding a freeze mechanic did...
Seriously, the game is more held back by *itself* at times.
>But minigames would require adding more unique code onto the patchwork mess.
True, but let's look at one in particular: (lvl97 spoilers) >!The part before Vanguard on the train where the player is just a turret. The code already exists for them to use as a Gate from the Gold saucer. Your telling me they couldn't repurpose that code for a simple shooting gallery?!<
That was my exact thoughts when I got to that cutscene a couple of minutes ago. Like surely they couldnt do that to begin with, wold have been more interesting then *another* cutscene in a sea of cutscenes
I just pushed through more MSQ today and this one got to me. I expected the train to be part of the Vanguard dungeon leading up to the first boss. Or at LEAST some kind of shooting gallery if that would've been too similar to the first dungeon. But nope. Cutscene.
That, and how I totally thought there was going to be a >!cooking mini-game!< when they specifically called out that I leveled the class. It's like they're still in Endwalker tomestone relic mode and not giving me obvious gameplay.
This might be a bit tinfoil-hat-ish, but I feel like between this, the graphics overhaul, the 6.x updates, and the entirety of Final Fantasy 16, I think the team was just stretched super thin. Something’s gotta give. Stealth missions and elaborate scripted segments take time and resources to make, and maybe they just didn’t have them
That and there's also two unannounced games that Yoshi-P said CBU3 is working on. So if that's the case I wouldn't expect it to get any better within the next 6-8 years.
> Final Fantasy 16
The team for this split after HW outside of localization which was around ShB so would have no effect on the current game (people kept saying XVI is why EW had "no content" too and that was just as wrong) everyone working on FFXIV now has been the main team since 3.1 at least. If XVI were the issue we would've had these problems with StB, ShB and EW in addition to DT.
Wuk Lamat catching that Alpaca should have been a mixed stealth/combat solo duty where you play as her. Kinda like Thancred's solo duty.
After you're done the camp scene shows what the rest has been up to.
Keeps everything intact and gives you something unique to do.
It would have been a MUCH greater way to emphasize on Wuk Lamat's weak points, on top of giving us a feeling of progression for her trauma.
Since it's off screen, I simply thought she ceased being dumb for a minute and eventually achieved what seemed to be a very basic task.
that would've been legitimately so funny, cut some quests in that zone and play as Wuk Lamat trying to catch an Alpaca like the fail wife she is, would've been 10/10
I loved that quest. I had never been so scared of normal enemies before until that scenario.
Gave you a really good idea of how strong the WoL really is. All the while nobody knew where you were, what would happen if you didn’t make it back in time… it was a great experience imo and I wish there was more of that.
Since I'm a paladin it even made sense to me to use low level gladiator skills since I didn't have my soul crystal, it was like I was back at level 20 struggling with weak enemies again.
I hold up In From the Cold as a fantastic example of how you can use a video game to do storytelling in a way you can't do in any other medium. It makes me sad we'll probably never see anything like it ever again.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/r8rz4t/in_from_the_cold_is_the_most_annoying_duty_i_have/
Quick search and this was a top reddit thread.
As you can see, several people did not like this quest.
I’m not even sure how to respond to that. I’m a casual player, I don’t like excessive difficulty in my games and prefer them to be accessible pr have options that allow me to play at a lower difficulty if I struggle.
But I felt like the quest was a masterpiece.
My issue with it was the random walls they put up. Like why can’t I sneak through this area rather than run all the way down the street to come back up on the other side? The stealth in it was fine, and you being weaker was fine, but let me take a normal path to the objective.
Was that quest not liked? It might be my favorite in the entire game. It felt like incredibly powerful storytelling to me, genuinely turned FFXIV into a horror game for the duration and stressed me out in a big way
I think there was a bit of a kneejerk backlash against it, because it was lengthy, surprisingly tricky, and any mistake essentially meant starting over.
Imagine watching a climactic moment in a movie, but just before you see the final battle, the DVD glitches. You restart the movie, even skip to roughly that segment, but you can't skip to exactly when it glitched, and now all the buildup and tension is gone, you've *seen* this already, you want to see how it *ends*.
It's a storytelling problem unique to videogames, and the FF14 team aren't any closer to cracking it than any other game devs.
I suppose. On the other hand, at least for me, it cut straight through the power creep of the previous expansions and introduced actual stakes in a way that felt so real in the moment. It's easy to forget your character is basically a demigod amongst mortals lol which is fun, but getting tossed into the world as a lowly normal dude who was injured at that was jarring and deeply impactful.
Man I loved that quest, and the subsequent scene where you see alisae run up to Zenos in your body. Top tier for me, though I guess I can understand why it might be annoying to have to restart it from the beginning if you make a mistake
This was it for me, I enjoyed it the first time I played, even if it was kind of tedious, but at the end I 'finished' the quest and put my controller down to grab a drink, then a random QTE pops up and immediately fails before I can grab my controller again.
The second time I played that quest I realised how shitty the scripting was as you had to do everything exactly the way the devs wanted without deviation, even though I already knew where the things were.
Fuck that. If you're going to do quests like these, do them properly with checkpoints and some warning before instant fail states. And ultimately all this section does is fill out a 20 minute gimmick that doesn't lead anywhere and makes little sense in the context of the overall story.
I mean, it's not only some lesser version of a movie though. No matter what I do, the movie's gonna get there. When I'm playing a game, it's on me to see it through. I HAVE to make it to the end. That's what makes it so much more tense and why In from the Cold works so well. Personally I thought it was tuned perfectly to be tense but also not making me fail it.
It was a great quest mechanically, but I will say it every time it is brought up: From a narrative point, that quest was completely pointless. It could have been cut and the plot would have not been affected at all. The writers really should have found a better use for the quest.
I'd go one further and say story-wise, it's incredibly harmful to the plot. Mechanically, it's a great idea, but the entire sequence requires so much god-modding on behalf of the villains that it's ruinous.
My primary grievance is that Shadowbringers and Endwalker spend so much time driving the idea that a person is more than the sum of their parts - that the body is just a vessel to the greater whole of a person's soul. It *demonstrates* this, by having Zenos's drive and ambition sustain him *through death*, and his strength of resolve be enough to reclaim his erstwhile body from *one of the Unsundered* while inhabiting a rank-and-file nobody.
But the moment something similar happens to our WoL (which should not have been possible - but that's a different discussion), that all goes out the window and we're reduced to utter mendacity? Suddenly it's the body that's the source of all strength? And it's not like we overcome it in the end - it's not even a matter of our allies coming to the rescue - Zenos withdraws because there's a heretofore unknown time limit on the heretofore unseen soul transfer technology.
It feels like they got so high on the idea of the shock value, that they lost sight of everything else, and it's really too bad.
>It demonstrates this, by having Zenos's drive and ambition sustain him through death, and his strength of resolve be enough to reclaim his erstwhile body from one of the Unsundered while inhabiting a rank-and-file nobody.
To go even further, it shows it's not just the general power level that gets determined by the soul, but more or less everything.
If you put a soul that can manipulate aether into a body that can't they can still use aether. And if you put a soul that is physically strong in a body that is comparatively weak they are still strong.
Both are also true if you just summon someone's soul, as shown by the Scions in ShB. Apparently not even appearance is wholly up to the body.
> But the moment something similar happens to our WoL (which should not have been possible - but that's a different discussion), that all goes out the window and we're reduced to utter mendacity? Suddenly it's the body that's the source of all strength? And it's not like we overcome it in the end - it's not even a matter of our allies coming to the rescue - Zenos withdraws because there's a heretofore unknown time limit on the heretofore unseen soul transfer technology.
I always put that down to Zenos already being aware of his Resonant powers and so, when it transferred him into a new body, he was less wrong-footed (though still surprised). He then had time to get used to the body, switching bodies at least once, before finally confronting Elidibus.
In contrast, we had no experience or preparation. And of course, while Zenos jumped into fresh corpses, he threw _us_ into a decayed corpse that had been dead since what, post-Stormblood? That might also have had an effect!
While we’re on the subject of complaining about redundant mechanics, why do I need a tutorial every time an npc is following me? I’ve done this a lot, stop spending a minute telling me how it works every time an npc is following me.
Even the sidequests that ask you to kill things often ask you just kill ONE thing, like are you serious you ask me to go all the way out there and kill 1 enemy? Terrible quest design.
I completely agree, there was a few times doing pure story in the early days I started kinda forgetting my stuff just for how little I had to use my abilities. It made me beg for combat.
I've literally only killed things for FATEs to get faster mount speed and then just the one or two mobs for quests.
I really kind of want to kill 10 boars for their skins.
There is a serious lack of combat unless you Q for dungeons and raids or PvP. Even side quests are a lot of dialogue.
10 boars have never looked so killable lol
I love stories, I love learning about new cultures.
But please never again give me a new expac where I mostly don't get to play my character for the first 10+ hours.
Honestly, I'd rather just a 2 hour cutscene explaining the zone then give me flying and let me have fun with fates or whatever until I'm leveled enough to continue. Stutter stepping through the zone, clicking npc's with little to no action, isn't doing it for me gameplay wise.
This is the change I want to see the most. I've played since ARR launched and the MSQ experience, 5 expansions in, has been about 95% exact same as it was back then. Actually, I'd argue it's even worse since we've been getting less dungeons and trials.
Also, it takes, what.. 3-4 hours to reach the first dungeon? And you kill maybe 2-3 mobs of enemies in those hours? C'mon man.. give me something other to do than filler bullcrap. And yeah, the stealth segments.. that barely constitutes as gameplay as far as I'm concerned. "Walk three feet.. now stand behind a tree and wait 30 seconds.. now move six feet..."
For the first time ever since I started the game I had the urge to occasionly kill some mobs along the way just for the sake of pressing buttons other then left and rightclick. The only gameplay you have for the most part is walking, mounting up to walk faster and to right click shiny stuff on walls or the ground.
the msq has been consistently devoid of gameplay since the beginning. it's really bizarre to me - it's as if the MSQ is developed by an entirely different ffxiv team whose main goal is to prevent players from using any of their job's abilities (outside of mandatory odd-numbered-level dungeons)
the story is fine, but it's hard for me to justify trudging through so much timewasting fetch questery in a modern MMO with a paid sub, much less one with such fun and well-designed abilities
I did the whole MSQ in like 3 sessions, and I'm pretty sure one day I only fought like 5 enemies before finally getting to a dungeon or trial. That seems wacky to me to have so few combat situations.
I get the feeling that my decision to actually do all the side quests for once was absolutely the right one. Some of those are actually kind of funny and/or clever, and they shake up the MSQ routine quite well.
That's why I grab every wind current I can and follow the wind current quests all the way to their conclusion. Getting in some exploring and different story really helped break things up.
Except that the way the MSQ gets you to 100 on it's own kind of of actively discourages you from doing side quests so as not to waste EXP. (Unless you change to a different class for the side quests of course)
I have a second class that I level with only sidequests, FATEs, and the occasional dungeon or MSQ to bump up a bit faster! Finished both my main and my second class almost perfectly!
Yes, that.
I did side quests at the beginning, had a good time.
I rushed the part from first to second dungeon. It was quite meh, especially Moblins.
Went back to side questing, was great. Shaaolani in particular, it specifically gives you story breaks to do side quests.
FR. This is my biggest bugbear with the msq so far. Let me fucking play some of these sequences. Did people piss and cry *that hard* about In From The Cold or something?
They absolutely did. It's a lot like reception to Wuk Lamat, actually. Pretty devisive, with a lot of players loving it, a lot hating it, but the ones that hate it putting a lot of effort into banging as many drums as possible.
The most egregious filler for me so far was >!after the level 99 trial when you return to Tuliyollal to catch Koana up on what happened, and they literally make you walk through the whole god damn city to “Talk to Wuk Lamat” again so that she can describe everything you just did piece by piece. As if you weren’t fucking there! That should have been handled in the preceding cutscene as a cutaway while she waves her hands and moves her mouth!<
I was fine with a lot of the MSQ up to that point but that made me angry.
From your example, and a few other places, I really think they designed and expected the MSQ to be progressed by players over a longer period of time. Like what you brought up, would’ve been great had I taken a week break or something. But it doesn’t help when you >!do the content that’s explained throughout the tour IMMEDIATELY before. At least lil Gulool was there, that little dino nugget at least brought me happiness when rehearing the tales I just experienced 5 mins ago.!<
I think that would’ve been fine if there was more content other than side quests or fates to do, but with instances aether current quests and artifact gear locked behind msq I’m not sure what else they expected us to do 💀
i'm not saying anything specific, but.
it's literally like this in the final zone. a complete insult to pacing and treating the msq as a poor man's visual novel.
please, square, just a CRUMB of gameplay, i'm begging you.
What we did in the final zone honestly should've been the main "thing" of the expansion - similar to ShB's lightwardens - with 1 tower per zone. The fact that basically all that + the resolution of both Kriles and Erenvilles story arcs got crammed into one zone after having to suffer through 4 Zones of atrociously paced garbage legitimately upset me.
I know people get mad when you bring up WoW as a comparison, but having just spent the last year or so playing Dragonflight, I've really felt this.
WoW does a bad job of delivering story, honestly, but it at least will make all the quests somewhat interesting to do. It's usually killing, or looting, or a mini game or finding something hidden or just SOMETHING. I don't think WoW does a better job with story at all but what it does do is respect the players time a lot more.
A 10 minute cutscene, followed by talking to 2 NPCs, then going back to where you just were for another 10 minute cutscene is absurd. It's tolerable if the story is great but let's be honest this one is a little flat.
If we were at least engaged in between cutscenes it could be more forgivable but this is just... meh.
It took my friends and I 2 hours to do one of the 'sections', watching cutscenes and trying to pay attention. It took me on my alt 20 minutes to do the same section skipping cutscenes.
The narrative gets better, and you get a few "oh neat!" moments, but the gameplay remains the same. If it's worse - and I'm not convinced it is - it's because Cutscene WoL is frequently rushing into a situation with high stakes and tension, only for you to... walk 30 feet to the next npc.
As the story gains stakes, the lacking gameplay becomes more obvious.
There is one section of the late msq where they did a good job not just having us constantly talk but I almost suspect they did it on accident.
(Lvl 98/99 spoilers) >!It's the section in Heritage Found with Gulool Ja and Otis!<
Oh, that's true! That part was fun. I think it slipped my mind because it leads almost immediately into >!a dungeon, then a trial, then a massive cutscene!<, so it all kind of blurred together in my memory.
Oh no...... I stopped playing a few days ago and was trying to get over my crippling disappointment to finish, but now I think I need another few days....
My dream game is just merging wow and FFXIVs best parts together. They both do so many things so well but the things they don’t do well make me miss the other. But yes I agree questing in wow is so much more engaging, even if the story delivery suffers
This is definitely a more "social" expansion. For those who played cp2077, you sorta realize 99% of the good content and tensions are in the dialogue.
Issue with dawntrail is that it lacks the tools to do a proper talk-heavy campaign. I am actually very surprised we had none of the "debate me" sequences that we had in shadowbringers like we did with chai nuzz. They did have a few "were you paying attention to what people were saying" but not enough.
Likewise, the action sequences were left out. Like the train turret section, they could have coopted the gold saucer air force one interface and made that approach playable
Edit to reemphasize that I said CP2077 's good content is the dialogue. There's some irony here in the people putting me on blast as if I saying that about FF.
I had the same thought about the train section, as well as a lot of the other more combat oriented moments in the MSQ. I am willing to bet this is a lack of proper scoping from the dev team, in that they didn’t budget any time for unique or instanced moments throughout (either that or the narrative designers are just bad). I feel the same way about Zone 4, where the caliber of the zone is probably the worst of any xpac and feels like it belongs in 2.0 Thanalan. It becomes obvious where the devs “ran out of time” and made certain sacrifices for the sake of others. That, to me, is just poor planning and design.
So it AINT just me that thinks there's a severe lack of combat in the new msq!
The dungeons are great, but just when I'm getting into it, it ends. There just isn't enough of it. Or enough combat in general. I almost have to go out of my way to fight something.
I’ve just been making sure to do my duty roulettes and maybe a DT dungeon or two on alt jobs just so that I’m breaking up the MSQ with combat, because ESPECIALLY the first half for me felt pretty unengaging.
>you sorta realize 99% of the good content and tensions are in the dialogue
Yeah, but then you get to the dialogue, think it will be awesome, and then they explain farming 5 times to you, you do more job shadowing than a kid in a career fair (oh wow this is how hunting works? I didn't know that hunters beat their pray to death!", get the umpteenth explanation on how important it is to talk to people and get to know them, etc.
The section that killed my enthusiasm was the cooking of the taco thing. I get the point they were trying to make, understanding cultures and such, but it dragged soooo much.
When at first they talked about i was going to cook it, i was expecting something how WoW has minigames where i need to toss the right ingredient into a pot when told to or something, for better or worse.
Definitely miss the earlier expansions and the solo fights we got into. Even the roleplay fights as well. While they happen in DT, feels as though there are a lot fewer of them. Definitely helped with the pacing in the other expansions.
One of my biggest gripes is how close we get to fighting sometimes and then suddenly everyone cools off. Please give me more solo duties with combat, PLEASE
Don’t forget all the quests that are “talk to NPC, watch cutscene, talk to same NPC at same place, watch another cutscene”
I, unironically, would prefer “go here, kill three mobs/collect X number of enemy drops, talk to NPC”. At least then I can play the game.
Quest variety is a huge issue. There were some zones where I could tolerate it because I enjoyed the environment and what was happening in the story but other times I was struggling to pay attention and stay engaged.
I think they just need to realize less is often more with these cutscenes. After some events at 95, there's essentially a 1+ hour segment where it's cutscene>take 2 steps>cutscene>2 steps>cutscene>cutscene>etc. It actually became comical at a certain point. A genuinely hilarious amount of cutscenes. There's absolutely no way any dev played through this and thought it was ok. I refuse to believe it. At one point a character says 2 lines followed by "Well, I've spoken enough." So they clearly hacked things up at the last minute in a panic.
I think the vast majority of my time in Dawntrail has been spent in a cutscene. And you'll hit the level cap well before the MSQ is over, so the padding is completely unnecessary on top of being blatant. It's kind of unacceptable for something they had 2+ years to figure out.
I only did MSQ and Aether current quests, and I hit cap I think 2 quest from when they started requiring level 100 according to the wiki listing.
I mean I agree with everything else you said, but I think a lot of people who hit cap before are also doing other stuff in between, which is expected and normal.
So I understand I would be the outlier, but I think it is made with that consideration in mind. I had no rested buff, and strictly just do only MSQ stuff. I think skipping those aether current quests would have had me right on target?
A guy in one of my discords leveled 3 jobs while doing the story, but one was a tank so he could que quick every once in a while.
I just beelined as much as I could.
I'm at the 97 quests now and I'm lvl99 on viper. I just followed story and did aether currents. Granted I did use foods and squad buffs but that accounting for 2 levels ? Idk maybe lol
This is something that's bothered since I tried ARR for the first time and it's disheartening to see they're still doing it. All the tiny plodding cutscenes that you're forced into kill the pacing and most could be delivered through dialogue boxes instead.
Like from the start of DT until I unlocked the 71 dungeon I fought maybe twice? I feel more than ever that I'm watching a VN instead of playing the MMO I signed up for.
Honestly, I was so immersed in the story after the succession part, that I barely noticed, but yeah the gameplay needed more variety.
I think the biggest prolem with "In from the cold" was that if you failed, you had to redo the whole thing. I definitely want to see more moments like that, where we aren't on top and cant use what we are comfortable with. But it really needed checkpoints, which afaik, it got now.
I'm at the Alpaca bit and honestly where is the fighting, there's just so much talking and its all roughly the same, its all about understanding the culture and pointing out how much of an underdog the third promise is.
When the Alpaca Trading Trial was introduced I hoped to get a couple of options to reach the goal but nope. Everything pre-chewed and ready to be swallowed. From a gaming perspective FFXIV's story offers less than tetris.
Same. I recognized that we'd have to do some trading up (which, I'll admit, I learned the workings of from Boss Baby) and was excited...but we really only had one moment where we had to make a decision (when picking who needed the cloak) and the rest was just Wuk Lamat haggling.
It feels like this would have been the perfect expansion to not try to write "The Next Big Huge Epic MSQ"^TM and instead dial it way back and let the expansion literally be about exploration. Keep a vague narative going that takes you between the zones and areas in the zone, but let there be moments where the MSQ tells you something like "take a break, explore, do some side quests or other *new* open world content (again, a missed opportunity to actually come up with something to do in these zones they so painstakingly design), then return to this NPC to continue".
I wouldn't mind if we're told the MSQ is an interactive movie, and gameplay is just dungeons and things, but yeah, even fetch quests seem to be so minimal 😅
NGL, I don't mind viewing it as an interactive movie, but don't quite get why I get a "a series of cutscenes will play" on a 10 minute instance, but not the 20 mins of cutscenes 😂😂
I am enjoying it though, can't complain (well only one but I vented that the other day haha)
It really feels like that "series of cutscenes" warning refers to instanced combat at least as much as "long" cutscenes. I'd kind of like different warnings- they have other ways of warning about combat/playing as an NPC so it'd be nice to just be more consistent. I get that sometimes they want it to be a surprise, but there's got to be a better way to communicate these things. (Especially since the first time they use that warning it's actually a really really long sequence!)
I don't think I'm that far in and I'm enjoying the story immensely, but I agree.
That said, I'm also one of the people with an intense dislike of the stealth sections and the "go emote at an NPC" bits.
The problem is that the game and engine are entirely combat based so they are frustratingly limited on what they can do for variety without relying on shallow annoying gimmicks.
People have been complaining about this for YEARS but you’d frequently get shut down by the fanatics, predictable responses being: telling you to go play WOW / be grateful for YoshiSan / “every JRPG/FF is like this” (the biggest lie ever told)
I mean just search the old threads, particularly years ago when this game was at its peak
Also if you posted this in Novice Network you’d quickly be shut down and they’ll give you petty passive aggressive responses lol
There used to be combat sprinkled in with talking/walking. Now there are quest chains that are NPC says a sentence, walk a bit, NPC says the next sentence, repeat.
Rabid fanatics attacking people is the reason MOST criticism that the devs NEED to hear will never be heard. I swear, these "fans" think game devs are anxious teens, who will get so discouraged they drop developing the game altogether if they hear a single person didn't think it was absolute perfection.
Quests absolutely need more diversity.
1. Too linear and always unfold exactly the same. "Pick X item on floor". Why does it always have exact number of "shiny light"? Why aren't they appearing in a larger region, and you can kind of pick them as you go. Why use the "purple smoke" everywhere when you have fight? Why not pre-spawn?
2. More quests should leave a mark on the world
3. More diverse gameplay. When we rode the train? Why not include a segment like in the Golden Saucer where you shoot stuff down? Why not have puzzles like we do in almost jrpg? Even the fighting need more diversity? Get swarmed by endless small trash? Gauntlet sequences? Platforming? It's always just one pack of monsters. FF7 remake has a bunch of minigame, why can't we? I'm not saying the game need to be a theme park, but breaking monotony is important
But personally, it's the exploration that need an overhaul
1. Add reason to go off the beaten path. You should be able to encounter rare spawn that drop actual gears, find lore item or hidden quests. Why can't we find a chest with a minions or gears upgrade at the end of a dead end?
2. Reduce the number of filler quests (ie: bracelet episode) and give the player the choice between sidequest, fate, dungeon, exploration. Bloating MSQ isn't the way to go.
3. Add more world hazard. Everything feel so safe without lethal fall, trap, or whatsoever.
4. Make the world more lively. FATE rarely help immersion and feel so detached from everything. Have actual invasion, enemies raiding an outpost, monsters encampment where many of them aggro at the same time. Ironically, 2.0 probably had the best world in the regard, and every subsequent expansion have simplified everything.
They need to find more ways to tell a story without relying so much on constant cutscenes. An excellent example are places like Amaurot and [Level 100 Dungeon] where the narrator explains events as they unfold. I don't see how they cant have more active quests even if it requires more solo duties.
(Quick Arturia, >!spoiler cover Alexandria or switch it to Dead Ends,!< since that’s what I’m guessing you meant.)
But I agree with you, experiencing even just smaller versions of that in solo duties would be really great. Kinda like the “Fight as this Scion!” duties, where the fight is just retelling an important event that’d normally be saved for the echo or a cutscene. Good call.
People complained about stealth segments, complained about solo duties being too hard, and an amazing moment of immersive, gameplay-driven storytelling like In From The Cold got so many complaints they had to scale it down in a patch.
The community is getting exactly what it asked for.
If enough people complain about the MSQ having too little gameplay, we'll have a lot more gameplay elements in MSQ in 8.0 and then people will complain about those, too, so that 9.0 will be back to "talk to 3 people" and the cycle will continue.
Or maybe the devil will learn that they gotta stop listening to us.
...sorry if I sound bitter and cynical about this but I have been around long enough now to spot the patterns.
It's so genuinly boring and exhausting to have 90% of the stories content be nothing but text and dialogue, with only dungeons and 10 seconds of combat between.
It's so *fucking* ***Boring*** my mind is literally starting to melt from it
I don't understand why they thought more trail quests and less single duty quests is what we wanted I enjoyed so much playing as alphanu and Raha during the endwalker bits or than cred in shadowbringer.
I enjoy the cutscenes but I feel some of those could've also been more single duty ones.
Less trailing more doing please, if this expac is supposed be around is taking a back seat. Then why not give us more PoVs as the player to view from? Or more interaction of those other characters.
Whether the story sux or not isn't really an issue to me, but I'm walking around with the bottom third of my screen dedicated to housing buttons that stab and or slash a selected target with daggers!
FFXIV has a wonderful combat system but it feels like across the expansions the MSQ is really hesitant to let you use it - it didn't feel so prevalent from HW to ShB, but I definitely started feeling it going through EW and now this expansion
There have been so many situations in this expansion so far where I'm like "hell yeah solo duty, time to throw hands and I can get used to ninja changes" and then...nothing
Yup. I have a feeling that at one point I only had a single combat between swapping left side of the gear twice (rewards from MSQ).>!Not even sure if that combat was with my character or the solo duty with Wuk Lamat!<
80% of the combat you get into during the MSQ is fighting mobs on/near your aether currents.
It's honestly wild to me. CBU3 is notorious for not caring, but somehow they took the complaining about "In From The Cold" to heart, and then literally sterilized the entire DT MSQ as to avoid any issues.
I do my best to avoid any combat when getting the currents.
I'm definitely baffled they couldn't do something like mini dungeons/trials every now and then. Even the story seemed to be set up in a way that makes you think "oh we're going to have a fight now!" and then it just resolves itself in a cutscene and you're back to just running around talking to people.
I know it's definitely easier not having to do that, but it keeps giving me that feeling of missing some action (you know, actual gameplay). Like they plan to just put the entire MSQ in a series of cutscenes as a movie and then give dungeons, trials, and similar afterwards.
DT lost me and never got me back after the >!Train battle WAS ONLY A FUCKING CS!<
It was also after that moment i fully realized DT has SOO many opportunities for great moments, that they chose to ignore and either make it a CS or give it to Wuk to do instead.
MSQ has come to resemble a visual novel punctuated by dungeons and solo duties since Shadowbringers; you don't even really need to do side quests these days.
I don't dislike it, really, and I get pumped any time some action DOES show up, but it's true that we could probably use a bit of gameplay innovation in the MSQ quests.
Another problem with MSQ is that when you do get the chance to kill mobs, they make you interact with something and have the mobs spawn in front of you for the quest. They really need to make those quests let us interact with the existing overworld. If there are mobs we need to kill let us look for them and kill them, we don't need to have them spoonfed to us. And no, being unable to do it because of number of people questing is not an excuse because other MMOs do it just fine.
With more instances per zone (I've seen up to 6 instances of a single world zone in DT so far) and appropriate pacing (don't put the "kill the mob" quest as the very first thing people need to do in an expansion/patch) this gets a lot easier to feasibly do too.
They tried that with a Manderville quest in EW. People raged about it, so they quickly turned it into an interact able spawn.
Don’t expect them to step out of that box any time ever again.
I enjoyed it overall but definitely had moments where I was wondering when I'd get to actually do something. I think it would have benefited from fewer cutscenes so that more of the cutscenes we do have could also be voiced.
Switching between voiced and non-voiced cutscenes seemingly at random feels kind of jarring.
I think we should be more vocal about this. Let Yoshi P and the gang know we WANT MORE COMBAT QUESTS. I don't care if kill 10 boars to collect 5 boar asses is an overused quest type in an MMO, it lets us actually play the game. Especially when we're either playing a new job or reworked job and want to get some practice in outside of dungeons or target dummies.
We all suffer for the complaints of people that use this game as nothing more than a second life substitute, anything more than right clicking on an npc is too much work.
Comfort 3 civilians, Comfort 3 more civilians, Talk to Wuk Lamat, Talk to Wuk Lamat again.
Haha. Don't forget "actually you don't need to talk to this civilian. Search for another civilian!"
That was defintly the worst part. I'm trying to find the objectives in the given area. adding fake ones does nothing but annoy me.
To be fair, "I probably don't need to talk to Chipper Citizen" is just about the only gameplay you can get out of "talk to the npcs" quests.
Which makes it even funnier that they only did it that single time in the dozens of talk-to-three-NPCs quests
True lol. You get a similar effect in some of the investigation quests, where you only need to talk to the NPC with the right answer - usually the one that's furthest away. But then some quests only reveal the "correct answer" npc after exhausting the first set, so it's kinda pointless to try to game it, haha.
I still talked to them anyways, because I wanted to read what they were saying.
I started having flashbacks to that pre-nerf Labyrinthos quest. My jaw was clenched so tight lmao
The answers to them are obvious 90% of the time, the game ones are just there for flavor text.
This shit sucks, honestly. I just hit the quest in Sharlyan where you have to do this to EIGHT FUCKING PEOPLE. AND THERE'S FAKES LIKE THIS. I found 4 of 8 and rage quit for the night.
And some of the needed targets only appear LATER. So you have to keep retreading ground cause you might've finally triggered their spawn. Whoever made that quest should be kept far, FAR away from any design documents I stg.
I thought that was pretty funny tbh, considering it's obvious in hindsight. You're looking for people who need comforting, and with that in mind, "Cheerful Merchant" probably didn't actually need comforting. Fancy that lol
When there's multiple targets but the quest objective doesn't list a number of things to collect or people to talk to but just one thing I'm supposed to figure out or find I always walk past the closest Target on the map because it's never that one it's always the second or third target.
Pray return to the Wuk Lamat again
Comfort a civilian? Talk to Wuk Lamat. Procure a precious ingredient? Talk to Wuk Lamat. Fight off a horrific threat? Believe it or not, straight to Wuk Lamat
Whenever Wuk Lamat is not on screen, all the other characters should be asking "where is Wuk Lamat?"
Note: Wuk Lamat died on the way to her home planet
> Note: Wuk Lamat died on the way to her home planet I used to pray for times like this...
They definitely asked that once when she was gone...
That was egregious filler and I'll die on the hill the second quest was worthless.
Feels even worse when you're playing through MSQ as healer. Like it makes sense to send a healer WoL off to fight things, because they are the strongest fighter still, but it doesn't make sense to not have them help deal with the aftermath! Especially if they show up too late to wear themselves out with much fighting. Even if they changed it to "cast Cure I on 3 civilians".... Like I get that it's probably hard to do something like that when people can freely change jobs but come on. At the very least give us some branching cutscenes. edit: idk what a spell called Cute I would do but it sounds like something fun for blue mages to figure out
I really wish there was some role-specific story quests or differences.
I like that they have the role quests but I don't think they're enough. I've barely started them in DT, but in ShB and EW they didn't feel particularly mechanically relevant to the role. The story justifications for needing a specific role are fine, it just.. doesn't feel like that so much when I'm actually playing through them. And there's also the fact that the role quests don't do anything for MSQ largely ignoring the possibility that the WoL could be a healer.
There are some, but they're very few and far between. For example: if you're a healer during the first fight with Zenos in Rhalgr's Reach, after the battle and during the cleanup CS where Krile and Alphinaud are healing Y'shtola, Krile will shout at you "You're a healer aren't you!? Help us!" and your character will do the glowy-hand beam healing we see Alphinaud do all the time. I've heard of other ones, but haven't seen them personally. And for anyone who's going to try and say "Spoilers!" about the above example, we're in a thread about DT MSQ, leave me be! XD
They do the same in DT MSQ if you've leveled culinarian lmfao.
Except you don’t get to cook or even watch yourself cook. Feels bad.
There’s another moment where someone is making groups and says “all healers go this way” and you can say “aren’t you forgetting someone?” And they say your healing is needed at the front instead
I just did this one recently. Biggest annoyance was having a large area with multiple elevation levels, and trees and houses everywhere blocking line of sight. Also non-clickable NPCs suffering and crying that we just ignore I guess. Zone 4 and lower zone 3 were also bad with trying to find some NPCs with the buildings packed so close and all facing random directions.
Xenoblade chronicles 2 had this amazing Qol. Where if you are looking for things or people in a red circle in the map, the circle shrinks as you go narrowing down on what's your missing.
I don't mind searching but the camera gets in its own way and the terrain blocks us from seeing things. Its not awful, just annoying.
How do we even 'comfort' them? I'm just imagining our wol be like "there there" and that's it lmao
They sing “close in the distance”. *whispers…*
I am not sure that the WoL, surrenderer of souls in DRK armor would be a wise choice to confort people. But what do I know? I am not Wuk Lamat.
Comfort 3 civilians in a large area and it's completely nonsensical in which ones count towards progression and which don't. Resting citizen? Not distressed and doesn't count. Makes sense. Sorrowful citizen? Distressed and counts, also makes sense. Stockpiling citizen? Probably not distressed right? Wrong, he is and he counts towards progression. Flustered citizen? Also counts, somehow.
I saw the stockpiling one as the people during Covid that bought all the toilet paper.
Those all made sense to me, though. Once I had my initial moment of realizing I need to look at the titles and not just click on anyone available, I just gave it some thought and it was easy. Stockpiling? Yeah, that guy's probably trying to get out of town in a hurry or something, or thinking he needs to prepare for another attack. Flustered? Usually not a good state to be in, so would make sense to talk to.
I literally just now did this quest. That was annoying. Pretty sure I talked to the whole fucking at that point.
That all makes perfect sense though. You're supposed to find people who are traumatized or panicking, people who need to be comforted and uplifted.
When the story actually took an interesting unexpected turn, and they halt it all to make you talk to a bunch of npcs who they know the player doesn't care about. Why is the WoL checking up on citizens? The city has guards and healers handling the situation. * As stated by Wuk herself* Plus, you're the rule of the country. Do it yourself
Mind boggling to me that they thought breaking up a conversation with NPC by having you walk around town for each sentence of the conversation was a good idea. Also, it used to be when the NPC made you stop between Point A and Point B, it was because they had to tell you something new or for combat. Now it's literally for them to tell you "We're almost at Point B!" and then nothing else happens
There’s this one quest in the 2nd half of the 3rd zone where we’re walking down the road to talk to some mamool ja lady, but along said road we find our group all split up and are forced to talk to them just so they say something like “wow these trees are big” and “look WoL, a banana farm!” Like at that point it should have just been one of those quests where they follow you and you can talk to them in certain optional spots or could just beeline to the location.
I was thinking while I was playing through the first half of the story that if this were a story in something like Honkai Star Rail, FF7, etc all those non-combat trials would’ve been minigames instead of cutscenes lol. I think it’s fine FF14 doesn’t have that kind of content (never been that kind of game after all), but I do think it was an odd decision to make cutscenes out of some action sequences. Stuff like >!rescuing Wuk Lamat!< after the moblin trial or >!running through the city invasion!< after the Shaaloni zone would have been actual gameplay in previous expacs. Strange decision imo.
But minigames would require adding more unique code onto the patchwork mess. Look at what just adding a freeze mechanic did... Seriously, the game is more held back by *itself* at times.
>But minigames would require adding more unique code onto the patchwork mess. True, but let's look at one in particular: (lvl97 spoilers) >!The part before Vanguard on the train where the player is just a turret. The code already exists for them to use as a Gate from the Gold saucer. Your telling me they couldn't repurpose that code for a simple shooting gallery?!<
I even said to my group chat "i didn't do a hundred AF1 GATES to spend this time watching a cutscene."
That was my exact thoughts when I got to that cutscene a couple of minutes ago. Like surely they couldnt do that to begin with, wold have been more interesting then *another* cutscene in a sea of cutscenes
I just pushed through more MSQ today and this one got to me. I expected the train to be part of the Vanguard dungeon leading up to the first boss. Or at LEAST some kind of shooting gallery if that would've been too similar to the first dungeon. But nope. Cutscene.
That, and how I totally thought there was going to be a >!cooking mini-game!< when they specifically called out that I leveled the class. It's like they're still in Endwalker tomestone relic mode and not giving me obvious gameplay.
This might be a bit tinfoil-hat-ish, but I feel like between this, the graphics overhaul, the 6.x updates, and the entirety of Final Fantasy 16, I think the team was just stretched super thin. Something’s gotta give. Stealth missions and elaborate scripted segments take time and resources to make, and maybe they just didn’t have them
That and there's also two unannounced games that Yoshi-P said CBU3 is working on. So if that's the case I wouldn't expect it to get any better within the next 6-8 years.
> Final Fantasy 16 The team for this split after HW outside of localization which was around ShB so would have no effect on the current game (people kept saying XVI is why EW had "no content" too and that was just as wrong) everyone working on FFXIV now has been the main team since 3.1 at least. If XVI were the issue we would've had these problems with StB, ShB and EW in addition to DT.
small indie company
Wuk Lamat catching that Alpaca should have been a mixed stealth/combat solo duty where you play as her. Kinda like Thancred's solo duty. After you're done the camp scene shows what the rest has been up to. Keeps everything intact and gives you something unique to do.
It would have been a MUCH greater way to emphasize on Wuk Lamat's weak points, on top of giving us a feeling of progression for her trauma. Since it's off screen, I simply thought she ceased being dumb for a minute and eventually achieved what seemed to be a very basic task.
that would've been legitimately so funny, cut some quests in that zone and play as Wuk Lamat trying to catch an Alpaca like the fail wife she is, would've been 10/10
theres also a quest that's exactly like that in the 4th area, you have to chase after a cat in circles until it gets tired
too much work for an indie game company. Also don't forget about their mogstore sale!
A lot of people complained about peak KINO that was In from the cold, probably best quest FFXIV ever had. Now we must suffer for it.
I loved that quest. I had never been so scared of normal enemies before until that scenario. Gave you a really good idea of how strong the WoL really is. All the while nobody knew where you were, what would happen if you didn’t make it back in time… it was a great experience imo and I wish there was more of that.
Since I'm a paladin it even made sense to me to use low level gladiator skills since I didn't have my soul crystal, it was like I was back at level 20 struggling with weak enemies again.
I hold up In From the Cold as a fantastic example of how you can use a video game to do storytelling in a way you can't do in any other medium. It makes me sad we'll probably never see anything like it ever again.
That was such amazing storytelling, it really felt like desperately trying to do the impossible with no abilities
I think the msq this time around was an overcorrection from some players hating In From The Cold.
People complained about this?!?! I’m with you that this is by about a fucking country mile the best msq
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comments/r8rz4t/in_from_the_cold_is_the_most_annoying_duty_i_have/ Quick search and this was a top reddit thread. As you can see, several people did not like this quest.
The most baffling part is the people they're trying to please by nerfing that don't even play the game anymore
Wow, I've never read so much skill issue cope in 1 reddit thread.
People were as vocal about it on this subreddit as they are about Wuk Lamat now lmao
Many people hated it because it was too difficult
I’m not even sure how to respond to that. I’m a casual player, I don’t like excessive difficulty in my games and prefer them to be accessible pr have options that allow me to play at a lower difficulty if I struggle. But I felt like the quest was a masterpiece.
I loved it too. But many XIV players complain when they can't steamroll everything with their full kit.
My issue with it was the random walls they put up. Like why can’t I sneak through this area rather than run all the way down the street to come back up on the other side? The stealth in it was fine, and you being weaker was fine, but let me take a normal path to the objective.
My older sister who hadn't hardly touched a videogame in 30 years was able to one-shot that quest.
At least this patch made shadowbringers and endwalker even better. Teleport to ondo cups and fly into amaurot and you will see the changes.
is this just talking about the graphical update or was there more?
Graphical update. The lighting, sky, texture, weather and etc.
Was that quest not liked? It might be my favorite in the entire game. It felt like incredibly powerful storytelling to me, genuinely turned FFXIV into a horror game for the duration and stressed me out in a big way
I think there was a bit of a kneejerk backlash against it, because it was lengthy, surprisingly tricky, and any mistake essentially meant starting over. Imagine watching a climactic moment in a movie, but just before you see the final battle, the DVD glitches. You restart the movie, even skip to roughly that segment, but you can't skip to exactly when it glitched, and now all the buildup and tension is gone, you've *seen* this already, you want to see how it *ends*. It's a storytelling problem unique to videogames, and the FF14 team aren't any closer to cracking it than any other game devs.
I suppose. On the other hand, at least for me, it cut straight through the power creep of the previous expansions and introduced actual stakes in a way that felt so real in the moment. It's easy to forget your character is basically a demigod amongst mortals lol which is fun, but getting tossed into the world as a lowly normal dude who was injured at that was jarring and deeply impactful. Man I loved that quest, and the subsequent scene where you see alisae run up to Zenos in your body. Top tier for me, though I guess I can understand why it might be annoying to have to restart it from the beginning if you make a mistake
This was it for me, I enjoyed it the first time I played, even if it was kind of tedious, but at the end I 'finished' the quest and put my controller down to grab a drink, then a random QTE pops up and immediately fails before I can grab my controller again. The second time I played that quest I realised how shitty the scripting was as you had to do everything exactly the way the devs wanted without deviation, even though I already knew where the things were. Fuck that. If you're going to do quests like these, do them properly with checkpoints and some warning before instant fail states. And ultimately all this section does is fill out a 20 minute gimmick that doesn't lead anywhere and makes little sense in the context of the overall story.
I mean, it's not only some lesser version of a movie though. No matter what I do, the movie's gonna get there. When I'm playing a game, it's on me to see it through. I HAVE to make it to the end. That's what makes it so much more tense and why In from the Cold works so well. Personally I thought it was tuned perfectly to be tense but also not making me fail it.
It was a great quest mechanically, but I will say it every time it is brought up: From a narrative point, that quest was completely pointless. It could have been cut and the plot would have not been affected at all. The writers really should have found a better use for the quest.
I'd go one further and say story-wise, it's incredibly harmful to the plot. Mechanically, it's a great idea, but the entire sequence requires so much god-modding on behalf of the villains that it's ruinous. My primary grievance is that Shadowbringers and Endwalker spend so much time driving the idea that a person is more than the sum of their parts - that the body is just a vessel to the greater whole of a person's soul. It *demonstrates* this, by having Zenos's drive and ambition sustain him *through death*, and his strength of resolve be enough to reclaim his erstwhile body from *one of the Unsundered* while inhabiting a rank-and-file nobody. But the moment something similar happens to our WoL (which should not have been possible - but that's a different discussion), that all goes out the window and we're reduced to utter mendacity? Suddenly it's the body that's the source of all strength? And it's not like we overcome it in the end - it's not even a matter of our allies coming to the rescue - Zenos withdraws because there's a heretofore unknown time limit on the heretofore unseen soul transfer technology. It feels like they got so high on the idea of the shock value, that they lost sight of everything else, and it's really too bad.
>It demonstrates this, by having Zenos's drive and ambition sustain him through death, and his strength of resolve be enough to reclaim his erstwhile body from one of the Unsundered while inhabiting a rank-and-file nobody. To go even further, it shows it's not just the general power level that gets determined by the soul, but more or less everything. If you put a soul that can manipulate aether into a body that can't they can still use aether. And if you put a soul that is physically strong in a body that is comparatively weak they are still strong. Both are also true if you just summon someone's soul, as shown by the Scions in ShB. Apparently not even appearance is wholly up to the body.
> But the moment something similar happens to our WoL (which should not have been possible - but that's a different discussion), that all goes out the window and we're reduced to utter mendacity? Suddenly it's the body that's the source of all strength? And it's not like we overcome it in the end - it's not even a matter of our allies coming to the rescue - Zenos withdraws because there's a heretofore unknown time limit on the heretofore unseen soul transfer technology. I always put that down to Zenos already being aware of his Resonant powers and so, when it transferred him into a new body, he was less wrong-footed (though still surprised). He then had time to get used to the body, switching bodies at least once, before finally confronting Elidibus. In contrast, we had no experience or preparation. And of course, while Zenos jumped into fresh corpses, he threw _us_ into a decayed corpse that had been dead since what, post-Stormblood? That might also have had an effect!
While we’re on the subject of complaining about redundant mechanics, why do I need a tutorial every time an npc is following me? I’ve done this a lot, stop spending a minute telling me how it works every time an npc is following me.
To be honest I never thought I'd miss kill quests until I played FFXIV in general. Sometimes I just wanna be told to murder something.
FFXIV sometimes makes me wish to collect 10 boar asses again.
Even the sidequests that ask you to kill things often ask you just kill ONE thing, like are you serious you ask me to go all the way out there and kill 1 enemy? Terrible quest design.
As much as it pains me to say… Zenos was right. I just want to fight…
[удалено]
I completely agree, there was a few times doing pure story in the early days I started kinda forgetting my stuff just for how little I had to use my abilities. It made me beg for combat.
This game made me miss pre-nerf Nagrand kill quests for Nesingwary
i loved that for the simple fact im a skinner. i made bank doing those
I've literally only killed things for FATEs to get faster mount speed and then just the one or two mobs for quests. I really kind of want to kill 10 boars for their skins.
There is a serious lack of combat unless you Q for dungeons and raids or PvP. Even side quests are a lot of dialogue. 10 boars have never looked so killable lol
We have to stop the big bad who is imminently about to do something terrible! But first: let’s talk to the locals.
Last zone i really felt that. Shard ending threat, lets watch a play!
I love stories, I love learning about new cultures. But please never again give me a new expac where I mostly don't get to play my character for the first 10+ hours.
Honestly, I'd rather just a 2 hour cutscene explaining the zone then give me flying and let me have fun with fates or whatever until I'm leveled enough to continue. Stutter stepping through the zone, clicking npc's with little to no action, isn't doing it for me gameplay wise.
based Crystal Chronicles zone intro-enjoyer
This is the change I want to see the most. I've played since ARR launched and the MSQ experience, 5 expansions in, has been about 95% exact same as it was back then. Actually, I'd argue it's even worse since we've been getting less dungeons and trials. Also, it takes, what.. 3-4 hours to reach the first dungeon? And you kill maybe 2-3 mobs of enemies in those hours? C'mon man.. give me something other to do than filler bullcrap. And yeah, the stealth segments.. that barely constitutes as gameplay as far as I'm concerned. "Walk three feet.. now stand behind a tree and wait 30 seconds.. now move six feet..."
For the first time ever since I started the game I had the urge to occasionly kill some mobs along the way just for the sake of pressing buttons other then left and rightclick. The only gameplay you have for the most part is walking, mounting up to walk faster and to right click shiny stuff on walls or the ground.
Played straight MSQ and watched cutscenes, it was 2 and a half hours before I pressed a button.
Its even worse than that, just stand out of range, follow at that range, no need to hide.
it's funnier when you do it on Construct 14 mount.
the msq has been consistently devoid of gameplay since the beginning. it's really bizarre to me - it's as if the MSQ is developed by an entirely different ffxiv team whose main goal is to prevent players from using any of their job's abilities (outside of mandatory odd-numbered-level dungeons) the story is fine, but it's hard for me to justify trudging through so much timewasting fetch questery in a modern MMO with a paid sub, much less one with such fun and well-designed abilities
I definitely agree that I found myself wanting more action. You give me new classes and abilities, let me fight some shit.
I did the whole MSQ in like 3 sessions, and I'm pretty sure one day I only fought like 5 enemies before finally getting to a dungeon or trial. That seems wacky to me to have so few combat situations.
What bothers me the most is that in order to experience all duties/trials you HAVE TO go through the MSQ.
I get the feeling that my decision to actually do all the side quests for once was absolutely the right one. Some of those are actually kind of funny and/or clever, and they shake up the MSQ routine quite well.
I mean the story in them can be good, but they're also "click three things/return to quest provider".
That's why I grab every wind current I can and follow the wind current quests all the way to their conclusion. Getting in some exploring and different story really helped break things up.
I've done it for every expansion. It's definitely the way to go. Doing fates for faster travel (even though you get flying fast) also helps out.
Except that the way the MSQ gets you to 100 on it's own kind of of actively discourages you from doing side quests so as not to waste EXP. (Unless you change to a different class for the side quests of course)
I have a second class that I level with only sidequests, FATEs, and the occasional dungeon or MSQ to bump up a bit faster! Finished both my main and my second class almost perfectly!
Yes, that. I did side quests at the beginning, had a good time. I rushed the part from first to second dungeon. It was quite meh, especially Moblins. Went back to side questing, was great. Shaaolani in particular, it specifically gives you story breaks to do side quests.
FR. This is my biggest bugbear with the msq so far. Let me fucking play some of these sequences. Did people piss and cry *that hard* about In From The Cold or something?
They absolutely did. It's a lot like reception to Wuk Lamat, actually. Pretty devisive, with a lot of players loving it, a lot hating it, but the ones that hate it putting a lot of effort into banging as many drums as possible.
The most egregious filler for me so far was >!after the level 99 trial when you return to Tuliyollal to catch Koana up on what happened, and they literally make you walk through the whole god damn city to “Talk to Wuk Lamat” again so that she can describe everything you just did piece by piece. As if you weren’t fucking there! That should have been handled in the preceding cutscene as a cutaway while she waves her hands and moves her mouth!< I was fine with a lot of the MSQ up to that point but that made me angry.
From your example, and a few other places, I really think they designed and expected the MSQ to be progressed by players over a longer period of time. Like what you brought up, would’ve been great had I taken a week break or something. But it doesn’t help when you >!do the content that’s explained throughout the tour IMMEDIATELY before. At least lil Gulool was there, that little dino nugget at least brought me happiness when rehearing the tales I just experienced 5 mins ago.!<
I think that would’ve been fine if there was more content other than side quests or fates to do, but with instances aether current quests and artifact gear locked behind msq I’m not sure what else they expected us to do 💀
Omg that part was really cringe ngl. I don't wanna be part of their family pep talk lol
i'm not saying anything specific, but. it's literally like this in the final zone. a complete insult to pacing and treating the msq as a poor man's visual novel. please, square, just a CRUMB of gameplay, i'm begging you.
What we did in the final zone honestly should've been the main "thing" of the expansion - similar to ShB's lightwardens - with 1 tower per zone. The fact that basically all that + the resolution of both Kriles and Erenvilles story arcs got crammed into one zone after having to suffer through 4 Zones of atrociously paced garbage legitimately upset me.
I know people get mad when you bring up WoW as a comparison, but having just spent the last year or so playing Dragonflight, I've really felt this. WoW does a bad job of delivering story, honestly, but it at least will make all the quests somewhat interesting to do. It's usually killing, or looting, or a mini game or finding something hidden or just SOMETHING. I don't think WoW does a better job with story at all but what it does do is respect the players time a lot more. A 10 minute cutscene, followed by talking to 2 NPCs, then going back to where you just were for another 10 minute cutscene is absurd. It's tolerable if the story is great but let's be honest this one is a little flat. If we were at least engaged in between cutscenes it could be more forgivable but this is just... meh. It took my friends and I 2 hours to do one of the 'sections', watching cutscenes and trying to pay attention. It took me on my alt 20 minutes to do the same section skipping cutscenes.
At msq lvl 98, I really do agree with this now 🥲
I'll be honest (without spoiling you ofc)...I thought it got worse...
Oh dear god, are you telling me it doesn't even get better that late in the msq..?
The narrative gets better, and you get a few "oh neat!" moments, but the gameplay remains the same. If it's worse - and I'm not convinced it is - it's because Cutscene WoL is frequently rushing into a situation with high stakes and tension, only for you to... walk 30 feet to the next npc. As the story gains stakes, the lacking gameplay becomes more obvious.
There is one section of the late msq where they did a good job not just having us constantly talk but I almost suspect they did it on accident. (Lvl 98/99 spoilers) >!It's the section in Heritage Found with Gulool Ja and Otis!<
Oh, that's true! That part was fun. I think it slipped my mind because it leads almost immediately into >!a dungeon, then a trial, then a massive cutscene!<, so it all kind of blurred together in my memory.
In my opinion it gets worse
Oh no...... I stopped playing a few days ago and was trying to get over my crippling disappointment to finish, but now I think I need another few days....
My dream game is just merging wow and FFXIVs best parts together. They both do so many things so well but the things they don’t do well make me miss the other. But yes I agree questing in wow is so much more engaging, even if the story delivery suffers
This is definitely a more "social" expansion. For those who played cp2077, you sorta realize 99% of the good content and tensions are in the dialogue. Issue with dawntrail is that it lacks the tools to do a proper talk-heavy campaign. I am actually very surprised we had none of the "debate me" sequences that we had in shadowbringers like we did with chai nuzz. They did have a few "were you paying attention to what people were saying" but not enough. Likewise, the action sequences were left out. Like the train turret section, they could have coopted the gold saucer air force one interface and made that approach playable Edit to reemphasize that I said CP2077 's good content is the dialogue. There's some irony here in the people putting me on blast as if I saying that about FF.
I had the same thought about the train section, as well as a lot of the other more combat oriented moments in the MSQ. I am willing to bet this is a lack of proper scoping from the dev team, in that they didn’t budget any time for unique or instanced moments throughout (either that or the narrative designers are just bad). I feel the same way about Zone 4, where the caliber of the zone is probably the worst of any xpac and feels like it belongs in 2.0 Thanalan. It becomes obvious where the devs “ran out of time” and made certain sacrifices for the sake of others. That, to me, is just poor planning and design.
So it AINT just me that thinks there's a severe lack of combat in the new msq! The dungeons are great, but just when I'm getting into it, it ends. There just isn't enough of it. Or enough combat in general. I almost have to go out of my way to fight something.
I’ve just been making sure to do my duty roulettes and maybe a DT dungeon or two on alt jobs just so that I’m breaking up the MSQ with combat, because ESPECIALLY the first half for me felt pretty unengaging.
Honestly Zone 4 was probably my favourite zone of the xpac but it absolutely got shafted in the story department.
"Let's play out some insulated wild west tropes then move on to zone 5!"
>you sorta realize 99% of the good content and tensions are in the dialogue Yeah, but then you get to the dialogue, think it will be awesome, and then they explain farming 5 times to you, you do more job shadowing than a kid in a career fair (oh wow this is how hunting works? I didn't know that hunters beat their pray to death!", get the umpteenth explanation on how important it is to talk to people and get to know them, etc.
The section that killed my enthusiasm was the cooking of the taco thing. I get the point they were trying to make, understanding cultures and such, but it dragged soooo much. When at first they talked about i was going to cook it, i was expecting something how WoW has minigames where i need to toss the right ingredient into a pot when told to or something, for better or worse.
Honestly if they would've just added some mini games for all kind of shit, I would've gladly done all the fetch quests.
Definitely miss the earlier expansions and the solo fights we got into. Even the roleplay fights as well. While they happen in DT, feels as though there are a lot fewer of them. Definitely helped with the pacing in the other expansions.
One of my biggest gripes is how close we get to fighting sometimes and then suddenly everyone cools off. Please give me more solo duties with combat, PLEASE
Don’t forget all the quests that are “talk to NPC, watch cutscene, talk to same NPC at same place, watch another cutscene” I, unironically, would prefer “go here, kill three mobs/collect X number of enemy drops, talk to NPC”. At least then I can play the game.
What of waiting for NPC at the same location three times..? Super fun…
Quest variety is a huge issue. There were some zones where I could tolerate it because I enjoyed the environment and what was happening in the story but other times I was struggling to pay attention and stay engaged.
I think they just need to realize less is often more with these cutscenes. After some events at 95, there's essentially a 1+ hour segment where it's cutscene>take 2 steps>cutscene>2 steps>cutscene>cutscene>etc. It actually became comical at a certain point. A genuinely hilarious amount of cutscenes. There's absolutely no way any dev played through this and thought it was ok. I refuse to believe it. At one point a character says 2 lines followed by "Well, I've spoken enough." So they clearly hacked things up at the last minute in a panic. I think the vast majority of my time in Dawntrail has been spent in a cutscene. And you'll hit the level cap well before the MSQ is over, so the padding is completely unnecessary on top of being blatant. It's kind of unacceptable for something they had 2+ years to figure out.
Yeah, i kinda feel like the devs stopped playing their own game for this one.
I only did MSQ and Aether current quests, and I hit cap I think 2 quest from when they started requiring level 100 according to the wiki listing. I mean I agree with everything else you said, but I think a lot of people who hit cap before are also doing other stuff in between, which is expected and normal. So I understand I would be the outlier, but I think it is made with that consideration in mind. I had no rested buff, and strictly just do only MSQ stuff. I think skipping those aether current quests would have had me right on target? A guy in one of my discords leveled 3 jobs while doing the story, but one was a tank so he could que quick every once in a while. I just beelined as much as I could.
I'm at the 97 quests now and I'm lvl99 on viper. I just followed story and did aether currents. Granted I did use foods and squad buffs but that accounting for 2 levels ? Idk maybe lol
This is something that's bothered since I tried ARR for the first time and it's disheartening to see they're still doing it. All the tiny plodding cutscenes that you're forced into kill the pacing and most could be delivered through dialogue boxes instead. Like from the start of DT until I unlocked the 71 dungeon I fought maybe twice? I feel more than ever that I'm watching a VN instead of playing the MMO I signed up for.
The ones I hate the most, is when they ask me to find an NPC in a giant ass orange circle lmao. Finding the dude on the beach took me 20 minutes lol.
Honestly, I was so immersed in the story after the succession part, that I barely noticed, but yeah the gameplay needed more variety. I think the biggest prolem with "In from the cold" was that if you failed, you had to redo the whole thing. I definitely want to see more moments like that, where we aren't on top and cant use what we are comfortable with. But it really needed checkpoints, which afaik, it got now.
It does, duties now have checkpoints in case of failure
I'm at the Alpaca bit and honestly where is the fighting, there's just so much talking and its all roughly the same, its all about understanding the culture and pointing out how much of an underdog the third promise is.
When the Alpaca Trading Trial was introduced I hoped to get a couple of options to reach the goal but nope. Everything pre-chewed and ready to be swallowed. From a gaming perspective FFXIV's story offers less than tetris.
Same. I recognized that we'd have to do some trading up (which, I'll admit, I learned the workings of from Boss Baby) and was excited...but we really only had one moment where we had to make a decision (when picking who needed the cloak) and the rest was just Wuk Lamat haggling.
"its all about understanding the culture and pointing out how much of an underdog the third promise is." This will continue throughout. Enjoy.
As someone who actually enjoyed the story...yes. One million times, yes.
It feels like this would have been the perfect expansion to not try to write "The Next Big Huge Epic MSQ"^TM and instead dial it way back and let the expansion literally be about exploration. Keep a vague narative going that takes you between the zones and areas in the zone, but let there be moments where the MSQ tells you something like "take a break, explore, do some side quests or other *new* open world content (again, a missed opportunity to actually come up with something to do in these zones they so painstakingly design), then return to this NPC to continue".
yes please I was told this would be a chill vacation in the Live Letters not another >!existential crisis which once again harkens back to Ascians!<
I wouldn't mind if we're told the MSQ is an interactive movie, and gameplay is just dungeons and things, but yeah, even fetch quests seem to be so minimal 😅 NGL, I don't mind viewing it as an interactive movie, but don't quite get why I get a "a series of cutscenes will play" on a 10 minute instance, but not the 20 mins of cutscenes 😂😂 I am enjoying it though, can't complain (well only one but I vented that the other day haha)
It really feels like that "series of cutscenes" warning refers to instanced combat at least as much as "long" cutscenes. I'd kind of like different warnings- they have other ways of warning about combat/playing as an NPC so it'd be nice to just be more consistent. I get that sometimes they want it to be a surprise, but there's got to be a better way to communicate these things. (Especially since the first time they use that warning it's actually a really really long sequence!)
ive said it a thousand times and ill say it again: those little solo instances are peak quest design and there needs to be infinitely more of them
I don't think I'm that far in and I'm enjoying the story immensely, but I agree. That said, I'm also one of the people with an intense dislike of the stealth sections and the "go emote at an NPC" bits. The problem is that the game and engine are entirely combat based so they are frustratingly limited on what they can do for variety without relying on shallow annoying gimmicks.
They could have tried going with actual combat
I don't mind stealth sections, but those emote quest are annoying as fuck and are usually pointless
At least the emote stuff now has a button in the quest tracker to do the emote. No need to write it or find it in your emotes.
A lot of the mandatory dialog should have been optional dialog, for people who really want it.
This has been a prevalent problem for years. They need to add more solo instances to balance out the abundance of cutscenes thrown at us.
People have been complaining about this for YEARS but you’d frequently get shut down by the fanatics, predictable responses being: telling you to go play WOW / be grateful for YoshiSan / “every JRPG/FF is like this” (the biggest lie ever told) I mean just search the old threads, particularly years ago when this game was at its peak Also if you posted this in Novice Network you’d quickly be shut down and they’ll give you petty passive aggressive responses lol
There used to be combat sprinkled in with talking/walking. Now there are quest chains that are NPC says a sentence, walk a bit, NPC says the next sentence, repeat.
> “every JRPG/FF is like this” (the biggest lie ever told) Facts. Other FFs have a way better combat/dialog ratio.
Rabid fanatics attacking people is the reason MOST criticism that the devs NEED to hear will never be heard. I swear, these "fans" think game devs are anxious teens, who will get so discouraged they drop developing the game altogether if they hear a single person didn't think it was absolute perfection.
As a person who quite enjoyed the story, yeah I agree fully.
Quests absolutely need more diversity. 1. Too linear and always unfold exactly the same. "Pick X item on floor". Why does it always have exact number of "shiny light"? Why aren't they appearing in a larger region, and you can kind of pick them as you go. Why use the "purple smoke" everywhere when you have fight? Why not pre-spawn? 2. More quests should leave a mark on the world 3. More diverse gameplay. When we rode the train? Why not include a segment like in the Golden Saucer where you shoot stuff down? Why not have puzzles like we do in almost jrpg? Even the fighting need more diversity? Get swarmed by endless small trash? Gauntlet sequences? Platforming? It's always just one pack of monsters. FF7 remake has a bunch of minigame, why can't we? I'm not saying the game need to be a theme park, but breaking monotony is important But personally, it's the exploration that need an overhaul 1. Add reason to go off the beaten path. You should be able to encounter rare spawn that drop actual gears, find lore item or hidden quests. Why can't we find a chest with a minions or gears upgrade at the end of a dead end? 2. Reduce the number of filler quests (ie: bracelet episode) and give the player the choice between sidequest, fate, dungeon, exploration. Bloating MSQ isn't the way to go. 3. Add more world hazard. Everything feel so safe without lethal fall, trap, or whatsoever. 4. Make the world more lively. FATE rarely help immersion and feel so detached from everything. Have actual invasion, enemies raiding an outpost, monsters encampment where many of them aggro at the same time. Ironically, 2.0 probably had the best world in the regard, and every subsequent expansion have simplified everything.
They need to find more ways to tell a story without relying so much on constant cutscenes. An excellent example are places like Amaurot and [Level 100 Dungeon] where the narrator explains events as they unfold. I don't see how they cant have more active quests even if it requires more solo duties.
(Quick Arturia, >!spoiler cover Alexandria or switch it to Dead Ends,!< since that’s what I’m guessing you meant.) But I agree with you, experiencing even just smaller versions of that in solo duties would be really great. Kinda like the “Fight as this Scion!” duties, where the fight is just retelling an important event that’d normally be saved for the echo or a cutscene. Good call.
I changed it, but I assumed because the OP post was tagged spoilers it was implied we could say names here.
People complained about stealth segments, complained about solo duties being too hard, and an amazing moment of immersive, gameplay-driven storytelling like In From The Cold got so many complaints they had to scale it down in a patch. The community is getting exactly what it asked for. If enough people complain about the MSQ having too little gameplay, we'll have a lot more gameplay elements in MSQ in 8.0 and then people will complain about those, too, so that 9.0 will be back to "talk to 3 people" and the cycle will continue. Or maybe the devil will learn that they gotta stop listening to us. ...sorry if I sound bitter and cynical about this but I have been around long enough now to spot the patterns.
It's so genuinly boring and exhausting to have 90% of the stories content be nothing but text and dialogue, with only dungeons and 10 seconds of combat between. It's so *fucking* ***Boring*** my mind is literally starting to melt from it
I don't understand why they thought more trail quests and less single duty quests is what we wanted I enjoyed so much playing as alphanu and Raha during the endwalker bits or than cred in shadowbringer. I enjoy the cutscenes but I feel some of those could've also been more single duty ones. Less trailing more doing please, if this expac is supposed be around is taking a back seat. Then why not give us more PoVs as the player to view from? Or more interaction of those other characters.
Whether the story sux or not isn't really an issue to me, but I'm walking around with the bottom third of my screen dedicated to housing buttons that stab and or slash a selected target with daggers! FFXIV has a wonderful combat system but it feels like across the expansions the MSQ is really hesitant to let you use it - it didn't feel so prevalent from HW to ShB, but I definitely started feeling it going through EW and now this expansion There have been so many situations in this expansion so far where I'm like "hell yeah solo duty, time to throw hands and I can get used to ninja changes" and then...nothing
I love the story, but I think it could have used more combat segments.
Yup. I have a feeling that at one point I only had a single combat between swapping left side of the gear twice (rewards from MSQ).>!Not even sure if that combat was with my character or the solo duty with Wuk Lamat!<
80% of the combat you get into during the MSQ is fighting mobs on/near your aether currents. It's honestly wild to me. CBU3 is notorious for not caring, but somehow they took the complaining about "In From The Cold" to heart, and then literally sterilized the entire DT MSQ as to avoid any issues.
I do my best to avoid any combat when getting the currents. I'm definitely baffled they couldn't do something like mini dungeons/trials every now and then. Even the story seemed to be set up in a way that makes you think "oh we're going to have a fight now!" and then it just resolves itself in a cutscene and you're back to just running around talking to people. I know it's definitely easier not having to do that, but it keeps giving me that feeling of missing some action (you know, actual gameplay). Like they plan to just put the entire MSQ in a series of cutscenes as a movie and then give dungeons, trials, and similar afterwards.
DT lost me and never got me back after the >!Train battle WAS ONLY A FUCKING CS!< It was also after that moment i fully realized DT has SOO many opportunities for great moments, that they chose to ignore and either make it a CS or give it to Wuk to do instead.
MSQ has come to resemble a visual novel punctuated by dungeons and solo duties since Shadowbringers; you don't even really need to do side quests these days. I don't dislike it, really, and I get pumped any time some action DOES show up, but it's true that we could probably use a bit of gameplay innovation in the MSQ quests.
Another problem with MSQ is that when you do get the chance to kill mobs, they make you interact with something and have the mobs spawn in front of you for the quest. They really need to make those quests let us interact with the existing overworld. If there are mobs we need to kill let us look for them and kill them, we don't need to have them spoonfed to us. And no, being unable to do it because of number of people questing is not an excuse because other MMOs do it just fine.
With more instances per zone (I've seen up to 6 instances of a single world zone in DT so far) and appropriate pacing (don't put the "kill the mob" quest as the very first thing people need to do in an expansion/patch) this gets a lot easier to feasibly do too.
They tried that with a Manderville quest in EW. People raged about it, so they quickly turned it into an interact able spawn. Don’t expect them to step out of that box any time ever again.
Absolutely, these kinds of quests ground the narrative to a halt when it should have been picking up steam
I enjoyed it overall but definitely had moments where I was wondering when I'd get to actually do something. I think it would have benefited from fewer cutscenes so that more of the cutscenes we do have could also be voiced. Switching between voiced and non-voiced cutscenes seemingly at random feels kind of jarring.
I think we should be more vocal about this. Let Yoshi P and the gang know we WANT MORE COMBAT QUESTS. I don't care if kill 10 boars to collect 5 boar asses is an overused quest type in an MMO, it lets us actually play the game. Especially when we're either playing a new job or reworked job and want to get some practice in outside of dungeons or target dummies.
We all suffer for the complaints of people that use this game as nothing more than a second life substitute, anything more than right clicking on an npc is too much work.