Final Fantasy XIV

Yesterday was of course a holiday here in the United States… and as such I allowed myself to go into holiday mode and sleep in super late. We really didn’t do much of anything to celebrate, in part because having a single carved out day in the middle of a week is kinda butts. Sure when I go back today it is Friday… and thus the weekend-eve but it still feels jarring. I could have in theory taken the day off, but we already had the director and another manager gone… just leaving two managers to cover everything. That said I sincerely doubt there will be much going on as probably the majority of the workers took the day off if they could.

This weekend was the weekend of the great server split. I happened to get up to use the restroom and get a drink, and when I got back my client had cashed. This began a sequence of getting the 2002 Lobby Server error until I finally made it back in and was plunked in an over 2000 person queue. This was effectively the reality of Wednesday night, and I managed to fight through two of these queues, when finally I got disconnected again and simply gave up on making it through a third one. This seemed to be some localized issues to that specific night, as they did some maintenance in the wee hours of the morning and things were back down to 15-20 person queues all yesterday.

As far as the story goes… I am now stuck up against the pre-77 wall. The one that I hit at 76 seemed to be pretty short and was able to do my daily hunts and a few rounds of FATEs to get through it without much issue. This one unfortunately has me hitting it well before I have hit the halfway point of 76. That means tonight I am probably going to need to buckle down and grind it out in random queues of the 75 dungeon. That said I am mostly okay with this… as it contains my new spirit animal… the Batsquatch.

All in all I am still digging the story, but the flow slowed down a bit once I cleared the forest moon of Endor. When the game devolves into the more political stuff, I struggle to stay engaged. When it is all big damned call to action… I am fully on board with whatever nonsense it seems to throw me in. I feel like we are in the third act lull before things start to get really good again. I’ve officially got context for what the big trailer reveal presented, and I have to say I am feeling really weird about that sequence of events. I do not know who I can trust in this world.

The above screenshot is being shown without context, but I am happy to see it. It is a place I hope we will one day visit. I am sorta jealous of the side group that is operating there. In truth the Wednesday night server apocalypse is as close as we have gotten to seeing real problems with the Shadowbringers launch. All in all it has been a really smooth experience and hopefully I am not cursing myself… but I have yet to see anything similar to Raubhan Extreme. I look forward to getting off work and grinding my way past the wall I am against and seeing hopefully the 77 dungeon.

I am rapidly getting to the point where I do not have much in the way of screenshots to share that are also not massive spoilers. Last night I took down my very first Trial of the expansions, and I was very pleasantly surprised with how that went down. I had done a little bit of reading up on the mechanics since I would be queuing as a tank, and they warned me about several tricky spots to watch out for that tripped groups up. However went it came time to actually doing the Trial I queued in… and everyone did the mechanics as necessary and we largely one-shot the encounter.

I have to think this is in part because Final Fantasy XIV does an exceptional job of messaging what the player should be doing. As we have arrived at this point in the third expansion, or fourth if you consider A Realm Reborn as an expansion… they have differentiated each type of effect so that it has a very unique visual signature. When you need to stack up there is a giant pictograph showing arrows pulsing in towards a center location. When the boss is about to do a mechanic that will have a rotational effect… there is a spinning wheel graphic around the outside of the boss indicating the rotation direction.

Final Fantasy XIV is a game that gives the player very clear advisement on what they should be doing at any given time and all they have to do is effectively pay attention to these. The first dungeon of this expansion was a bit of a wake up call and refresher course, and having done that it largely set the tone for the expansion and the expectations of the players. You will be doing mechanics, you already know how to do this… you just need to follow the directions. Doing this up front seems to have bore fruit in how generally smoothly that Trial went. Now we did have some struggles in the 2nd dungeon with a Dragoon that did not want to mechanic… but whatever the case we pulled through it and adapted quickly.

Last night I pushed into 74 and have started the forth and I believe final new area of the expansion. I’ve reunited with more friends… but I am still absolutely confused to some details of that reuniting. I am also deeply confused by other things going on, which sorta gives me an idea about what events have transpired since we were last with them. Final Fantasy is really good at making a deep cut that calls back a couple of expansions, and I think one of these is happening and will eventually unfold. I’ve also made a handful of predictions about what is to come. I think a major character that we keep running into is a Light Warden for example, but I won’t go into any level of detail on that one yet.

As far as the launch contest, I had some entries… actually way less than I would have expected. Regardless there were a bunch of good comments, which was in theory the point of this. I had a spare time card and since I pay on the maximum cycle I never can use them as square only allows you to accrue so much play time credit at once. It seems that google now has a random number generator if you search for “random number generator” and I used it to draw the result.

So Congratz to Blu3 who is winning the time card. I will be reaching out to you today to send you the code. I hope everyone is still enjoying the expansion, and honestly I am in that point of looking forward to getting home every night to see more story unfold.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to even begin to talk about Shadowbringers, especially with the limitation of not wanting to spoil anything for anyone who isn’t joining until Tuesday. I have to think at this point that is probably a very small group, given that if you are going to play a MMORPG expansion there really is no reason not to pre-order it. Regardless Shadowbringers head start began on Friday and I didn’t get in to play at all until that evening. I am woefully behind the pack in leveling because life happened this weekend in a way that pulled me off the computer.

For lack of a better term… Shadowbringers is to Final Fantasy XIV what The Burning Crusade was to World of Warcraft. This is the first time we are leaving the normal flow of the game and going somewhere that exists on another world. Both are games about broken worlds and a populace that is hanging on by a thread. However Burning Crusade represented a bombastic and comic book style version of that setting with literal fields of Hellscape or entire zones turned green from Fel energies. Instead Shadowbringers represents a much more subtle and adult version of peril… where the thing we all thought was a good thing ran amok and swept away most of the planet in a giant flood of flight energies… plunging the world into eternal daylight.

The story weaves around attempting to save this shard known as the first so it doesn’t end up triggering a cataclysm on our world known as the source. What you see is a world gone wrong… with lots of areas that will remind you so much of areas in Eorzea. Amh Araeng for example reminds me of the deserts of Southern Thanalan and parts of Ala Mhigo, just with the races and their characteristics all jumbled. Similarly Kholusia feels very much like La Noscea and with that Eulmore like a twisted version of Limsa Lominsa. I make the reference in the title but in many ways it reminds me of the subtle changes that were made to the world in Final Fantasy VI as you roam the World of Ruin.

On the Source we are well known as the Warrior of Light, and there is rarely a situation we are going into where the other party does not recognize us. In the First we are a stranger in a strange land and learn early on that we should not go about talking about our powers. This is a realm that had its own Warriors of Light, that ultimately unleashed the flood. As such it is a world that is resigned to its calamities and untrusting of any would be heroes that happen across their path wanting to lend a hand. Essentially this is the perfect version of the Outland… and the one that only Final Fantasy XIV could deliver to us. It is a setting rich in its own lore that is curiously divergent from our own, but also a setting that is going to feel eerily familiar at every turn.

As far as the class changes… I am loving Warrior and I have apparently abandoned all sense of trying to level in a measured manor. It took me some time to figure out some of the changes and I had to lean on Ashgar to tell me where my active mitigation went. Now that I am used to it however I am really enjoying myself, and loving the absence of TP. I’ve also spent some time playing Samurai and Bard but they both seem to largely be unchanged in real meaningful ways. On the other side I have heard of lots of classes that got massive reworks, and so far people seem to be enjoying them. I’ve spent some time playing as a Gunblade, which is a really weird tank but Tam seems to love it. I am sure I will play more of it as time goes on. Right now there is so much I want to do… but I am largely trying to keep myself focused on leveling and moving the MSQ forward so I don’t get left completely behind.

I am greatly enjoying myself and wish I could take the entire week to sit at home and play. I didn’t really get anywhere near as much time as I would have liked to play this weekend. Saturday was taken up by a string of horrible things going wrong… that started with an outdoor wedding on an Oklahoma summer day with a heat index of 111 degrees. I’m a little sun burned after that and the rest of the day sorta went downhill. On Sunday I had to catch up on all of the things that didn’t happen Saturday which put me feeling like I am 2 to 3 levels behind the pack. Thankfully Grace has been willing to healbutts whenever I finally unlock a dungeon, so I am at least able to progress through. However once again we are suffering from the too many tanks problem, but unfortunately… I just don’t feel comfortable playing any other role.

Also another reminder. There is a contest going on where I am giving away a 60 day time card. You can view the full contest rules over on this post, but essentially go there and leave a comment of at least two sentences telling me what you are looking forward to the most in the game. Tuesday morning I will collect the comments and decide a winner, since the cut off for the contest is the official launch day. Hopefully you too are enjoying Shadowbringers, and I was super careful not to give too much of the plot away for those who might not yet be to that point in the story.