Good Morning Friends! So for the last month and some change I have been enjoying the heck out of Final Fantasy XIV. I have to admit that I rode the wave of nostalgia to get back engaged with the game and have seemingly grabbed hold with both hands. Maybe it has grabbed hold of me instead… whatever the case I am having a blast. I have also managed to get over a severe mental block that I had built up for myself over the course of the last three or four years against doing group content with strangers. The thing is… there are a lot of strangers in the game. Right now the game is flush with brand new players experiencing content for the first time and it is exceptionally easy to blend in with that crowd.
I never really sat out to make content for the purpose of new players, but then I started the whole Super Dungeon Friends thing and find myself in the position of answering a fair number of questions. There is one point that I keep seeing asked in various places, and I thought I would talk a bit about it. Final Fantasy XIV has a copious amount of content, and by copious, I am meaning several hundreds of hours worth of story content. One of the interesting choices that the developers have made is that you are required to get the “Main Story Quest” in order to unlock several bits of content along the way. For example, you cannot ride a mount until you have reached a certain place in the story. Additionally, the vast majority of dungeons and trails will unlock as you wind your way towards them as part of the overarching narrative of the game.
The above image is an infographic that Redditor Cyberfunk3 created showing all of the quest content in the Main Story Quest (MSQ) and other key story content in the game. One of the delightful things about the game is that it has released content over the years with a predictable cadence. Essentially with each expansion, you have the content available at release and at the end of that, you see a game credits screen. Then there is a large amount of content that is patched into the game finishing out the central conflict and setting up the events for the next expansion that represents roughly half the story of the initial release. Once you finish this you get a second credits roll and the events of that sequence lead into the opening moments of the next expansion.
When you spread the content out on an infographic it represents a shocking amount of content. Over the years Yoshi P and crew have greatly streamlined some of this content in order to make it flow better but it still will represent several hundreds worth of hours of work to see the final credit roll. Truth be told I am level 80 and happily playing the game and still have yet to quite catch up on the most recent patch content. One of the truths that I am going to share with you, that you need to keep in the back of your head as you approach Final Fantasy XIV. It is a game about the journey and not the destination. There is no mythical place at the end of the content where “the real game begins”. The story content and all of the little vignettes of action along the way are the real game. There is not a second game that unlocks when you have collected enough unobtainium in order to bypass some gate-check at the end.
Many of you that are arriving on the shores of Eorzea will have likely been playing World of Warcraft, and I think it is important to understand that you are entering a different sort of game. Right or wrong over the years, the Warcraft team has positioned that game in a way so that only the last 5 to 10 levels worth of content are actually relevant. Often times this is even more limiting with only the last patch or two actually bearing any relevance on the day-to-day lives of the player base. There are probably thousands of hours worth of quest content available in World of Warcraft, but the team is only actually focused on the most recent content.
What this means in practice is that a player can comfortably boost a character all the way to the beginning of the latest expansion and not really feel like they actually missed anything. In truth old content is often buggy because he had been abandoned by those who update things long ago. You encounter NPCs that no longer make sense within the context of the current story arc, and in truth, everything you are doing is funneling you into the “Endgame”. So it is easy to understand where this feeling that we as players need to rush our way through the content as fast as we can in order to start playing the actual game located just behind the final level of content.
One of the most curious things that Square Enix does is allow players to skip the story entirely for a fee. They understand how daunting it is trying to play through all of that content and I believe these were originally designed for players who wanted to start a second character on a new server but didn’t want to have to push through multiple hundreds worth of stories to get to where their other characters were. However, it seems the mindset that World of Warcraft has instilled in us as players, is catching new players in a trap thinking that they can skip straight to the endgame and be instantly relevant. Please understand that this is a massive mistake and if you choose to do this… you will never understand any of the subtlety or nuance of the storytelling that is happening.
Final Fantasy XIV is a game where every moment, every morsel of content is being placed in a very specific manner and often times gets referenced later. You will see NPCs that you maybe have not seen in thirty levels showing back up and treating you like old friends. You will see moments that happen in the first seconds of the game, referenced again later for emphasis. The story that is woven in Final Fantasy XIV is deliberate and has a slower pace but it also has managed to deliver some of the most shocking and unexpected moments of storytelling I have ever experienced in a game. So often players are spending so much of their effort trying to catch up or “waiting for it to get good” that they end up squandering the moments when the game is trying its best to ease you into this world.
The content difficulty is additive in Final Fantasy XIV and I spent some time over the weekend pondering this point. There are several fights that I have experienced recently that at the time it was released I thought were some of the hardest mechanics I had ever encountered. The thing is… I’ve gotten used to them and seen them so many times at this point that a certain level of “muscle memory” has been developed allowing me to now navigating them with ease. FFXIV is exceptionally good at building player skills through throwing very clearly delineated mechanics at them and always using the exact same indicators so that you can look at an attack and know exactly what it is going to do.
For example, almost always the first attack that a boss throws out is going to be the “tank buster” or the attack that the tank is going to need to apply some sort of mitigation to in order to smooth incoming damage. Knowing this means you can watch the cast bars of the boss and understand when exactly you are going to be taking a significant spike in damage. It also lets the healers know what they should be managing around in order to top that health back up. This education starts with the first dungeons you encounter and continues to ramp up difficulty and number of mechanics as you make your way through the content. Skipping ahead means you are also skipping all of this time spent training that muscle memory. Folks don’t spend a lot of time explaining mechanics in dungeons because FFXIV has taught them a very specific encounter language throughout those hundreds of hours worth of leveling.
It is a phenomenal time to start playing Final Fantasy XIV. Currently, the game is available with a massive discount so that you can get all of the content currently available for only $24. The thing is those story skips are also heavily discounted and you can pick one of those for $18. I would caution you against doing that because ultimately you are robbing yourself of the experience of playing Final Fantasy XIV. I get that there is that drive to catch up to your friends who have been playing for years, but the thing about this game is that no content is ever outdated. Yoshi P and crew understand that it is important that players are running content from all levels of the game in order to maintain a healthy ecosystem and as a result, you never really say goodbye to a chapter of the game. I queued for leveling roulette over the weekend and got thrown into Sastasha, aka the very first dungeon the game has, and honestly had a great time experiencing that content over again.
What you are getting with Final Fantasy XIV is a game where pretty much all of the content in the game remains viable. Gearing exists in this realm where there are heavy catch-up mechanics and it is a token-based system that allows you to save up for exactly the item you need. This means they can attach the awarding of that currency to things like duty roulettes and have you run what is effectively ancient content and make it still feel rewarding. The other aspect of the game is that most of the fights, especially trials and just plain fun to experience. The high-end content is a dance that you perform with your friends and not a wall that you bash your face against. Sure learning that dance is hard sometimes, but once you have the patterns committed to that muscle memory it is shocking just how easily it comes back.
I talked about this in yesterday’s post, but I spent a decent chunk of the weekend going back into old extreme trials with my friends looking for rare drops. It was a lot of fun and while we were doing it with four players rather than eight players… the challenge was still there enough to keep it interesting. We still had to pay attention to the mechanics and still had to perform things in a certain manner in order to get through the encounters. The dance came back as we made our way through it, and so often while I am doing roulettes I get thrown at a dungeon that I have maybe not run in years. It is fun to dust that memory off and experience it fresh with brand new players. However that whole experience is additive and without having gone through all of that content leading up to it, you will be at a disadvantage.
For me at least, it seems the surest way that you will bounce off of Final Fantasy XIV is to boost your way through it. There are characters in this game that I love and I feel a deep lasting attachment to. The reason why is because I have lived with them for eight years. We have gone through high points and low points and so many side adventures that they feel like living breathing beings to me. I reached that point however because of all of the story this game provides and the excellent storycrafting. That is not to say that there are not plenty of super cringe moments, but the cumulative total of the experience is phenomenal. Final Fantasy XIV is about the marathon and not the sprint. It is a tale told in hundreds of hours and not a rush to the most current content in order to stay relevant. The story skip will rob you of that experience, and it is highly unlikely that if you didn’t like the story… that you will find something that keeps you engaged.
