Cleared the Endwalker Main Story Quests, and the major boss battles in this game are unreal and beautifully choreographed. Who has ever thought that an MMORPG could have such an epic boss battle?
Endlwaker’s story also shows that you don’t need to have an in-game NPC turned into evil just because he accidentally touched a random stone or heard some obvious whisper from dark force or corrupting your best champion to make the story work. Just good writing and planning ahead are enough.
The final boss trial and final solo duty battle still left me speechless, in a good way.
I’ve played FF14 and I found the story writing was fine but the way Square Enix integrated the story into the game to be utterly boring. The vast majority of it is: go to NPC A, read quest text or watch cutscene, go to NPC B, read quest text or watch cutscene, repeat. Eventually you unlock a dungeon or raid and get a quest to go do that. There are some exceptions, generally requiring you to enter a special quest instance, but overall its passive story telling that rarely integrates your own character into it beyond being a messenger boy between NPC’s. The actions you take (besides traveling) are rarely done in the open world.
Contrast that to other MMORPG’s like GW2, SWTOR, and WOW where your specific character will go to an NPC and after reading quest text or watching a cutscene, it will be given a specific set of missions to accomplish and these are almost always done in the open world and not special instances. For example, go there kill 20 people, or go here and escort civilians to there, or whatever. Your character’s actions progress the story. Eventually have finishing those missions you go back to the NPC and get more of the story and are usually shuttled off to a different NPC.
FF14 does have a decent game economy and I really loved how 1 character can have multiple jobs (which thankfully eliminates the need to repeat the MSQ). Its inventory system was just awful as was the way it handled transmog and dyes.
FF14 is a strong solo role-playing game in an MMORPG chapter environment.
But like all these new alleged MMORPGs, it’s not one anymore.
They only carry the genre name MMORPG and have the characteristics that many players play their solo game on a server at the same time and behave like NPCs in instanced areas and woe betide anyone who doesn’t work the way it should, then the human NPC still becomes a whip-wielding anti-hero, which fortunately happens relatively less often in FF14 than in WoW, for example.
For people who like to experience a solo quest track, FF14 is very well suited.
If you want more instance warfare, go to WoW’s latest endgame offshoot.
If you want to play real MMORPGs, you’re like a fish out of water, they don’t exist anymore.
And why that is so, is very easy to enumerate, which I spare me now times, because the thread should keep its friendliness to FF14.