Good Morning Friends! Remember yesterday when I said I was hesitant to finish up the Final Fantasy XIV storyline? Well… sometimes I contradict myself because I did precisely that. I was about maybe a third of the way catching up on the story when I started this mission over the weekend. I am honestly surprised at how fast that I managed to catch myself up. I went into this not being certain I would actually play Dawntrail, and now I find myself rather pumped for it. Truth be told I would have rather the Thirteenth storyline tied into the expansion, but I guess I am relatively happy to see it concluded for the time being.
As happy as I am with where the story wrapped up, I want to talk a bit this morning about the worst freaking part about this game. At two points last night I had to stop the flow of the story, to run to the market board and buy a piece of gear so that I could get over the arbitrary item-level gating requirements. Now I came back before the last set of crafted gear was put into the game so when I bought my way to relevancy I bought most of a set of 610 gear for a few million gil. This meant that my item level was sort of all over the place. I bought a new weapon when the last gear set went in giving me a single 640 item level item, and this mishmash was good enough to get me all the way to the last dungeon of the expansion.
When I set forth to do The Lunar Subterrane I needed an item level of 620 and I was sitting at 617. So I went to the market board, replaced my lowest-level item, and was able to get past this gate. It cost some 300k gil, but I figured I was probably good to go for a bit and could at least finish out the story. Then a few minutes later when I unlocked the final Trial… I was hit with a 5-level jump and again needed to make up the last two points to get over that hurdle. So once again I had to break my way out of the flow of the story to go pay my way to freedom again. It just feels awful to know that you have to keep getting nickeled and dimed by the market in order to see the conclusion of the story.
What I find most frustrating about this situation is… that Final Fantasy XIV has some rather damned good scaling tech. It would likely be trivial to scale players up to the minimum item level for a dungeon so that they can complete the story. Yoshi P has freely admitted that a large chunk of the player base returns right before the launch of a new expansion to catch up on the story… plays through the new expansion… and then disappears again until another expansion launches. It seems somewhat ludicrous that this has been a problem for EVERY expansion… and yet there has been nothing done to ease the pain. I am not saying that scaling should always be there… but folks catching up on the MSQ should be given a one-time pass of that gate so that they can actually see how things sort out without a lot of grinding. I have plenty of gil… it was easy for me to buy my way to freedom but not everyone has that option.
I think what makes all of this worse is that I am really rather pleased with how the post-Endwalker content was resolved. I had a lot of fun playing it. But there is this base level of resentment that I feel towards the game for draining my wallet just so that I could see it to its conclusion. Maybe I am just too used to Guild Wars 2 at this point where I set up a single set of gear several years ago and have been able to do everything in the game without ever needing to change it. I’ve gone through this with Stormblood, Shadowbringers, and now Endwalker so I knew what I was getting myself in for. That does not make it feel any better to keep having to return to the Market Board to try and limp through the story gates, however.
All of that said… I am legitimately looking forward to Dawntrail. I am looking forward to seeing the new continent and I legitimately like Wuk Lamat. She reminds me of my friend Shandrah but with a Spanish accent. I don’t love some of the setup where we will be on opposite sides of a conflict from our friends, but I feel like before all is said and done we will end up together. I am very much looking forward to adventuring with Krille, and I am hoping that before all is said and done we get to see Zero once more. I became really invested in that character and want to see far more of her story and that of the Thirteenth. I’m also curious how the fuck Solution 9 fits into all of this because a weird cyberpunk city does not seem to make sense.
