Duse, people know what MMOs are. MMOs don’t radically change after leveljust like ARPGs. The combat stays the same just the arenas you do it in changes. I have never played one that felt good early on but bad at endgame.
I thought I had found a nice well-rounded WoW guild right in the exact middle between potato & tryhard. But as a paladin in MC I was expected to backline cleanse bot on trash mobs even, which was very disappointing. Major encounters is one thing, I absolutely do my duty. But these giants, please…It’s called Seal of Wisdom and the axe I had for it was nuts. Yes I still had a cruddy Crest of Retribution, big deal. Let me actively heal infinitely ffs! IIRC I couldn’t even juggle purify & cleanse, I seem to remember thinking them costing the exact same mana and how dumb that was.
I have been playing FF14 for a year and I haven’t touched most of the endgame content such as Bozja, Eureka, High on Heaven, Extreme/Savage Raid, Ultimate Raid, Treasure Zone, Relic Weapons for ARR+HW, Trust leveling, and other non-combat content such as Chocobo Racing and Breeding, Fishing, Triple Triad, Island Sanctuary and etc.
I only started Palace of the Dead recently due to the requirement needed to play the upcoming Endlwaker Deep Dungeon.
So for those people who think there is no game in FF14, only excessive cutscenes, well you are so wrong. There is a good reason why people said it was easy to get sidetracked when playing the MSQ because there is simply too much content to do and they just don’t know where to start.
Even completing the whole daily Duty Finder list will take at least 2+ hours to do so.
Also 
Depends on what fight you’re talking about. FFXIV Ultimates are on par with and even go above Mythic in difficulty. Particularly Dragonsong Ultimate, which is the newest one. Echo, a guild that has multiple world first clears in WoW, started prog for Dragonsong almost a month ago and still have not cleared it. To be fair, of course, they are not hardcore FFXIV players.
So if anyone thinks FF14 hardest difficulty is a joke, perish the thought. Just saying.
The current Endwalker max item level is 630+ and it only can be farmed from Savage difficulty and most of the FF14 players won’t be able to clear it because it is really hard.
The highest ilvl for those who don’t do Savage content will be ilvl620 and it was weekly gated, so it will take a few months to get all ivl620 for their character’s class. ilvl 610 is the best gear that mass can use without taking part in Savage contents or time-gated.
That should be the A Realm Reborn Finale before Heavensward. It was one of the most shocking and depressing cutscenes when I first watched it.
Expert isn’t super difficult. It’s not the highest end gear either. The highest dungeon drops 595 gear but you can get tokens to buy 620 gear. The highest possible is 635 for highest end raiders. Having 620 as a casual is plenty satisfying. That’s my opinion of course.
But as soon as the next content patch hits… the hamster wheel begins anew…
Eh, MMOs while lvling and in endgame are nearly completely different games most of the time. Unfortunately.
Yeah…and if people are looking for a challenging 4-man dungeon to run, Another Sil’dihn Subterrane is the answer.
Another Sil’dihn Subterrane is a 4-man dungeon with Extreme difficulty, and there is Savage difficulty too.
This seems pretty similar to just sticking to queued dungeons in WoW, with the caveat that the gear isn’t quite as close to top tier gear.
It doesn’t really matter how good it was, as far as I’m concerned an entire episode of a TV show has no real business being right in the middle of what is supposed to be an interactive game.
It is not for you to decide as the FF14, the game with excessive cutscenes is the most profitable game for SquareEnix.
https://dotesports.com/business/news/final-fantasy-xiv-continues-to-carry-square-enix-to-financial-success
Clearly FF14 developers knew what they are doing. 
And I rather have everything told in the game thru cutscenes than ask me to buy the real novels/books to fill the lore/plot of the game. 
Plus, if you have an issue with the cutscene, you can skip the cutscene just by tapping a button and then rewatch the cutscenes you skipped or missed in your inn if you wanted any time, any day, or replay a new game+.
So yeah, please don’t use the cutscene as the reason/excuse for you to dislike/quit FF14 since there are also many players in FF14 skipping and rushing to the endgame whether thru buying the “Skipping” feature or skipping in-game manually.
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It is for me to decide when we’re talking about if I like the game or not. My opinion is entirely for me and me alone to decide.
This is my opinion, not me saying this the only way things are allowed to be.
I’ve criticized WoW for all their outside source material that tells us critical plot elements.
Story should be in the game, and I should get to interact with it. This is a video game. I don’t want to read about characters doing cool stuff and I don’t want to see them doing it.
I want to do the cool stuff.
That lone cutscene wasn’t the only reason(and for the record I did skip it), it’s just compounded over multiple hours of how their story is implemented.
I don’t like how Final Fantasy tells video game stories. It’s something I think is better suited to trying to make a movie at some point if you’re gonna have that many cutscenes.
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And I tell you there is nothing wrong with their business model or direction.
Which you did do a lot of cool stuff in FF14, but of course, you wouldn’t know since you didn’t finish it.
Nay. FF14 is fine with its current direction. I like that the game fleshed out the characters and slowly build the climax thru cutscenes instead of telling us everything in a text/paragraph “Things happened. Character A died. Character B chases. Now you go to Zone C because why not?”
It’s because they classify mobile scamware as “games”. It should be a separate category. Recently it has also crept on PC and many people think they are playing games when in effect they are being scammed. DI is a good example. That thing is not a game in the traditional meaning.
Okay?
I wasn’t saying there was a problem with their business model. You’re defending against an argument I didn’t make.
If it happens later I’ll refer you to my earlier point about how “If I have to spend 50+ hours to get to the good part, I probably wont consider it a good game”.
Which again is trying to argue against a point I didn’t make.
I basically said “I don’t like FFXIV because X” and you replied going “no you’re wrong it’s such a good game!”.
Are you… bothered by the fact that I don’t like it? Am I… not allowed to dislike a popular game?
Okay then.
As I said before, if I have that kind of mentality, I won’t be able to find so many good gems in movies, comics, games and etc in my life.
I am super glad I don’t share the same mentality as you do.
Well I have plenty of games, movies, comics, etc. that I enjoy.
but I tend to enjoy the things I like right out of the gate.
I also obviously don’t have an issue with a movie being non-interactive. That’d be weird.
If Square was not fettered with optical drive limitations, they would have executed 40-minute cutscenes long ago. Epic sweeping narratives is the legacy of final fantasy and they were waiting just for this environment all along.
Hey, you do “cool stuff” after 100 hours! 
Anyway, I dont mind some heavy cutscene storytelling, and the aforementioned overly long cutscene was the best part of my experience when I tried to get into FF14 again recently. At least something finally happened in an otherwise very boring story.
The stuff you did before that cutscene, and after that cutscene, on the other hand… was fetch questing between NPCs to unlock more dialogue and cutscenes. That part was my problem with it, much more than the cutscenes themselves.
Funnily enough even a lot of the FFXIV players I’ve talked to will agree that ARR isn’t that great, and say that Heavensward is “when the story gets good” which is something like 100+ hours in.
but the last bit of ARR is particularly bad because for several hours all character progression basically just stops, as you’ve hit max level for ARR and are now doing patch content. This part really killed a lot of motivation for me because character progression is incredibly important to RPGs for me.
and of course even if you do set that aside and go level up somewhere else for a bit, the game doesn’t really like that and will just keep setting your level back down to where it wants you to be.
The combat and how a character plays remains the same. The activities may be different. One may not like leveling or endgame, but adter a few hours of playing one most will know if it is worth it to stick it out. Just like ARPGs. D2 and PoE having clunky feeling combat doesn’t change in late/endgame with access to more skills, the combat is just janky. It might get faster, but ultimately after a few hours most will know if they want to stick with it.
Nier, I’ve been told has an amazin narrative. Couldn’t care lass becasuse the game play was crap. Hades was this can’t miss game, I was bored playing it. And so on. My entertainment needs to hook me early or I’m not wasting my time. There was a show on Netflix(altered carbon IIRC), the first episode was so boring, I didn’t finish it, people at work loved the show, told me i needed to get to episod 5 or 6 before it got good. Sorry not wasting 6 hours on something before it gets good, if it even did.
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Not just where the story gets good but when the game isn’t quite the slog 1-50 is. So many jobs don’t even get their defining skills until later. That’s one design they could fix. I agree people shouldn’t be set to go early on but we shouldn’t have to wait until 80ish to break out of our shells.
And then people said Heavensward isn’t that great because Shadowbringers and Endwalkers are superior. ARR standalone alone is good…it is just other expansions were better.
Before HW was released, ARR got a positive and good reception.
It is normal for every FF14 expansion, where all you do was farm better gear in every patch content. Only that now in ARR, the game straight away gave you access to ilvl130 gear for Lv50 character, so you will feel that there is no character progression once you have all ilvl130 gear in ARR since you got the best gear that will carry you until Lv56+ HW.
Before HW, you don’t get ilvl130 gear that easily. It happened in every expansion or patch update where the previous best gear of that expansion was made easy to buy after a new expansion/patch was launched.
If you can get your ARR character to Lv90, you can use Unrestricted Party in Duty Finder Setting to allow you to solo Lv50+~60+ dungeons and trials, where the game doesn’t scale your level and ilvl gear.