Games

Well folks… once again I try my best to cherry pick a screenshot that doesn’t obviously show anything for a post as I am trying to maintain my stance of not spoiling anything. Yesterday I wrapped up the Endwalker Main Story Quest and let me tell you… it was a ride. With all certainty this is my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion and quite possibly my favorite MMORPG expansion of all time. Yesterday I talked a bit about the complicated emotions surrounding that notion, because this is a game that requires you to have lived through all of the hundreds of hours of content from A Realm Reborn to Endwalker to really appreciate the gravity of this situation. Friends… I cried so much last night, enough that my wife suggested that maybe I really shouldn’t be playing this game especially since my baby is still in the hospital right now and that has caused a massive dip in my emotions as well. They were not all bad tears…. and honestly a lot of them were the tears of remembrance and joy that you might have when visiting old friends.

Endwalker is an expansion that does not go anywhere I might have expected it to go. It was an expansion where we knew four of the six total destinations ahead of time, but even then… there were so many revelations as I played through it. The remaining two “secret” destinations really are mind boggling and I am still reeling from the impact of some of the revelations that come from them. If I had a complaint it would only be that the sixth location arrived too late and was a bit too cumbersome to traverse. It played a key role in the story… but after the first interludes it was pretty certain the path before us… and then it just took a long time for it to actually play out along those lines. Essentially the pacing of the final chapter of the game was a bit monotonous for my tastes. That does not mean that the conclusion does not feel earned or meaningful, but those final steps as we got there were a bit cumbersome.

That said I feel like they absolutely “stuck the landing”, and managed to drive home the actual final moments of the expansion. More important than the journey I just completed… I have so much hope for where we are going next. The game does a great job of teasing just how little of the world we actually know anything about and how many of the reflections we have yet to visit. I am extremely interested to see the next story and how it evolves over the course of this expansion and its patches. The only thing that I don’t fully know is the shape of the post patch content, because it honestly feels like we have tied up most of the loose ends associated with the “Ascian” storyline. In the past there has always been a dangling thread here or there that could be tugged upon, and we are really lacking that. I do wonder if they will spend the .1 through .55 patch really devoting it entirely to setting up the next conflict, instead of breaking that into an epilogue and prologue like they have done before.

Now we tread into some light spoiler territory, but Endwalker is an expansion that has made me care about every single character save one. I do not get Zenos existing past Stormblood in the Final Fantasy XIV franchise. I am uncertain if this character is just super beloved in Japan or something, but it is without a doubt the worst creation to come out of the Final Fantasy franchise. Even Kefka has more depth and he is just a murderous clown. Zenos being too painfully bored to care about anything is not interesting, and I feel like the fact that he had anything to do with Endwalker and Shadowbringers for that matter is a waste of screen time. My spoiler is this… they never manage to do anything interesting with Zenos and he is STILL the worst character. Even Fandaniel they manage to make me care about and add some depth to that character, but Zenos remains a one note tune that just has cool armor and weapons.

Now I find myself terribly torn. I want to start working on the endgame, and want to start leveling additional characters… but I also sorta feel bad in doing so because maybe I should back the fuck out for awhile and let someone else have my slot. I did what I felt like I needed to do… I completed the storyline and now have experienced that emotional roller coaster. Now I want to make sure all of my friends have experienced it so that we can have the big spoiler show about it. The problem is… it isn’t like I can actually give my spot in the line to someone else. So I am in this weird territory where it almost feels like it is my duty to stop playing for awhile until everyone has caught up… but also I don’t want to. We will see how the weekend goes and I guess I am thankful that Kenzie being hospitalized has at least allowed me to stop trying to nursemaid her constantly so that I could finish things up.

Endwalker and its story has really been a godsend the last few days, and has kept my mind off the constant worry over my baby girl. There isn’t much that I can do right now and I have to have faith that the doctors are doing what they can while she is hospitalized. They are under Covid protocols still and it isn’t like I can even go see her right now. I am getting calls from the Vet a few times a day with status updates and things are still pretty touch and go. She is improving and starting to act more like herself but she is very much not out of the woods yet. Essentially they are fighting to stabilize her blood sugar while at the same time trying to control negative reactions happening in her pancreas and liver while also fighting a bladder infection that they feel probably triggered the entire cascade reaction. I talked to the Vet three times yesterday and the first one was pretty grim, but as he progressed through the day he got more hopeful in his voice. Essentially his focus is to get her well enough to come home, so that she can rest in her familiar environment and heal faster as such. In theory that should happen at some point this weekend. So I greatly appreciate all the thoughts and prayers I have gotten for Kenzie butt, and here is hoping everything continues to go in the right direction.

Ambiguous screenshot time! Really I feel like there is almost nothing that I can actually talk about from Endwalker itself without somehow being at risk of spoiling something. This is definitely the sort of experience that you don’t want to spoil for anyone. I am now sitting at level 90 and have what feels like quite a lot of story left to go. There is one entire end game zone that I have yet to discover, and I am guessing that this sort of flow was planned as I am already wearing my set of artifact gear that I obtained at level 89. Instead of talking about the story itself I am going to talk this morning about a general thought process running through my head.

I am very drawn to calling Endwalker as the best Final Fantasy XIV expansion to date, but I find myself questioning if that is even a fair designation. It feels like if you had skipped the story all the way through A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers… would this one expansion be capable of standing on its own? I think it would still be a very interesting story being told, but so much of what is happening stands upon the shoulders of a decades worth of experiences. There are moments that draw back to Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 and major touchstone moments that draw upon our experiences from every subsequent version of the game. As a result the Endwalker story cannot realistically be divorced from the decades worth of content that brought us to this point.

I had very similar thoughts when the Marvel Studios movie arc resolved itself with Avengers Endgame. If you were to ask me the single movie in that series that I enjoyed the most… then I would say Endgame without a doubt. However it is also a movie that cannot possibly stand on its own merit because by the time we reached that conclusion a decades worth of prolific movies had taken place. Twenty two movies lead us to the conclusion of Avengers Endgame and so many moments within that movie only really make sense if you were there for the entire ride. Is the story itself interesting? Sure especially if you have watched its bookend Infinity War, but will it have near the impact if you were not in it from the beginning? Hell no, there is no way you could feel the summoned feelings if you did not at least experience the majority of the films.

So ultimately if you ask me my favorite Final Fantasy XIV expansion, I am going to say Endwalker. It is the pay off that comes at the end of a very long and winding journey. If you are NOT caught up with Final Fantasy XIV then I implore you not to rush the process. The payoff that comes in Endwalker is worth the wait and you need to have experienced the roller coaster of emotions that led us to this point in order to really appreciate the totality of this journey. Those of us who have been on this journey are finally getting so many things explained… that would have probably felt cheap if we had just jumped to the end of the novel and read the last page. This resolution is well earned and I cannot count the number of times I have found myself weeping tears of joy and pain over this game. By the time we reach this point it feels that we are adventuring with old friends, and not random characters in a role-playing game.

I look forward to reaching the actual conclusion of the game and seeing how all of the loose ends get tied up into a bow. I am also extremely curious what the .1 through .3 patch cycle is going to look like this time around. Lastly I am extremely interested to see what new story arc is spawned out of this expansion. It really is the close of everything that came before it and the beginning of an entirely new era of Final Fantasy XIV.

Good Morning Friends! It has been a wild weekend. Initially I had expected to drop a post on Friday with my early thoughts about the game… and that never really happened. I was too busy playing the game and also by reference too scared to log out because the queues kept getting larger. When I logged into the game around 8 am there was only a queue of 30 people, and as the day wore on that just kept getting bigger. I read some analysis of the Steam data and apparently there is a roughly 400% increase in the peak numbers from this same time during Shadowbringers. Admittedly Steam is the wrong way to play the game and as a result you have a tiny portion of the overall population playing on that platform, but still some extrapolation should be able to be made about the massive increase in players that we are experiencing.

There has been a pretty constant flow of information coming out of Square and more specifically Creative Business Unit III, and the most recent is that they will be giving free play time as partial compensation for how rough the situation is currently. I get that this is probably still a bitter pill to swallow for the folks who have been unable to play at all. For example as bad as the situation is for the North American Data Centers, I hear the European Centers are even worse. I’ve heard discussion of over 10,000 player queues happening over there to try and get in and play. The worst I have personally seen myself was over 7,000 the other night when I logged in just to see how bad the queue was after our podcast.

Worse than the queues however has been our old friend the 2002 error. Now I have been bit by this in the past, and thankfully thusfar because I am logging in extremely early each day… I have yet to encounter it. However most of my friends are struggling constantly with getting punted from the queue and having to rejoin it… in the vague hopes of doing all of that fast enough to get back their position in the line of players waiting to get in. Honestly I think a lot of folks would feel better about waiting if they knew that sitting in line would actually guarantee them eventually getting in. However that login infrastructure is being used by ALL of the players, and it is getting pounded to death. Quite honestly I am not sure what can be done because right now it is extremely hard to get your hands on enterprise grade servers. I know in my own line of work our move to the cloud has been accelerated by the fact that anywhere we tried to acquire them… we were looking at at least a six month wait.

If you CAN play however… the expansion has been great so far. Prior to the release of the expansion Yoshi P said something about a major shock coming around 83, and I can verify this occurrence. I am grossly over leveled due to the side quests… because they are so freaking great this expansion. However were I just focusing on the MSQ I would have hit this spot around level 83… and quite honestly from this point forward I am not sure what is going to happen. All of my predictions for the shape of this expansion and what would happen… are now out the window. This game and this team are one of the few teams that can really throw me for a loop like this. Every single expansion there are several things that just come from out of left field and challenge my notions about the game and this expansion is no different.

There is one thing that I have found really frustrating, and I am going to try and address this in as low spoilery as a possible manner. In video games and MMOs specifically there are two mechanics that I absolutely hate. The first is being asked to play someone other than my character and the second is being forced to do stealth mechanics. I play a tank for a reason and that reason is I never want to have to sneak around in order to accomplish things. So far this expansion has given me two unskippable duties where I had to do both of these things at the same time. Were it not for the fact that the queues were so freaking long… I probably would have rage quit out and played something else for awhile. I don’t invest hundreds upon hundreds of hours in a character… and then not want to play that character and I detest stealth mechanics in games in general. Putting both together and putting them on a timer… another thing I hate… was almost too much for me. I made it through it and I hope that is the last I see of that stupid bullshit for the rest of this expansion.

At this point I am maybe a third of the way through the story… maybe even less. I know there are two areas that are shown in the Aether Current system that I have yet to visit. It seems like there is a mountain worth of content still ahead of me, and last night when I stopped for the evening I had just unlocked the level 85 dungeon. I do not however think I am even vaguely close to the mid point of the game. Some shit is happening and I have to deal with it, but also I have no clue HOW we will deal with it. Right now the game is doing a phenomenal job of keeping me in the dark as the player character and there are a few paths ahead of me… and I am not really certain WHICH of those are going to come to pass. I am not sure yet if this team is going to do what I think they might do, and that is a good thing. I am constantly guessing… which is all the more reason why I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone else.

One of the things that I did years ago, is create a “quiet time” tab in my chat interface. Essentially it acts as a second general tab but with all of the public channels turned off. I felt like this was probably a good idea given that there might be accidental spoilers that happen in zone chat. Essentially turn on only the things that you feel you need the most so for me I have tells, party, free company, and a few specific linkshells turned on. I highly suggest you create your own limited chat because honestly more than anything it cuts through the noise and lets me focus on the game itself. Once I have finished the story I will go back out into the public channels, for the time being however I am just hugging my friends as I pass them but largely ignoring most of the world.