People say FF14 respects your time more, but I’m gonna push back on that. It took me about 80 hours to get to anything interesting. 80 hours just to complete the ARR MSQ. The majority of that time being “go here, talk to person. now go to another place, talk to another person”. I timed it once, it took me an hour and a half to get to any gameplay. That entire time I was just watching cutscenes and clicking through dialogue boxes. People call FF14 an MMO but I would contend that it is a visual novel with light MMO elements.
That being said, I am actually kind of invested in it. I don’t know if it’s sunk cost, but I intend to return to it to continue where I left off prior to the release of TWW.
While I won’t call the details incorrect, it really is a matter of perspective:
FFXIV is structured like a JRPG.
It’s not a WoW-style MMO.
The story is the focus, and many of us also played through such dense narratives with only text as voice-acting wasn’t added until the PS2 era with FFX. The genre persists today, and the norm is 40-60+ hour long games (20-30 hours is considered short for the genre) with mostly story content. I’ve viewed each of FFXIV’s expansions as part of a series of full length JRPGs (especially with the patch cycles counted), and with that it does make more sense.
Now, FFXIV “respecting your time” mostly comes down to how you regard the MSQ. For most, it’s the main reason for playing the game; while ARR is not the best introduction, it’s not trying to waste your time. It’s trying to provide a good experience from start to finish… but yeah, the expansions do it better (generally). Compare that to WoW, which is only starting to treat its story as domething other than “disposable”.
The biggest difference is seen in the endgame, where WoW drags stuff out to a ludicrous extent. FFXIV doesn’t do that, which is better for most players. But for the constant progression-seekers (which WoW caters to), they quickly run out of stuff to do.
In WoW, the “real game” doesn’t start until you hit the level cap.
In FFXIV, it starts with logging in for the first time.
While FF games tend to be dialogue heavy, I’d say there’s still a healthy amount of gameplay breaking up those moments of dialogue. You might spend a while going through dialogue and cutscenes, but I’d say you spend more than that grinding mobs. At least, that’s what I tended to do. There was a lot more action breaking up the downtime, whereas in FF14 there’s sparse moments of action breaking up the downtime.
I pretty much got through ARR out of pure spite. Heavensward was what convinced me to stick with it.
It could be related to the streamlining that was done with ARR in particular, quite a bit of the gameplay sections were trimmed down due to the amount of “pointless running around” involved; the lead-up to Titan in particular was infamous, though I’d argue (pre-trim) Garuda was even worse.
But yeah, a lot of FFXIV’s gameplay sections generally are on the shorter side unless it’s a dungeon.
But for a point of comparison, are you familiar with the “Xeno” titles? Xenogears, Xenosaga and Xenoblade? They are known for more dense & involved narratives (from a team of devs that branched off from the FF group) and FFXIV arguably gets closer to those in terms of story-to-gameplay ratios.
Never played a xenogears game, I know pretty much nothing about them.
For my part, I wish there were dialogue options. Even if they made no meaningful difference in what eventually happens in the dialogue encounter, I would rather have at least some small way to express my character through dialogue decisions. I’m not a huge VN enjoyer but I consider dialogue choices to be a form of gameplay. So if it had more of that, I would probably not be as sore about how long it takes at times.
Some good news there - they are in FFXIV!
… if not really prominent until Shadowbringers.
A few sprinkled around earlier, but not much. It is mostly for flavour, affecting how characters react for the next line and not much else, but they are there.
I’m not familiar with the specifics, but I thought this was an option? Like, by default, all your spells and health are your max level, but only certain modes scale you down appropriately?
I’ve been told I picked the most boring job. But also played ARR, which is the more boring story. So I got the worst of both worlds. I was going to play Astrologian, so I put up with it for 40hrs. C_C I’m not sure how much it’s changed since SL’s exodus though.
In FFXIV, the default is to reduce your level (and gear ilvl) to match that of the content. This can result in being unable to use higher level abilities in low level content. It can be disabled, but only with a pre-made party or solo.
There means there’s no “scaling” like WoW does it. The player is adjusted to suit the content, not the other way around… and it works FAR better. The difficulty of content stays where it should be, more or less.
But classes get outdated, the leveling experience is vastly crippled as you do not get the feel of your class until lvl.80, and the further levels go adding stuff, the less you have at lower levels to press, limiting you to a 1-2 button rotation if, as max level, you end up in a low level dungeon.
Combo sequences, mitigations, etc. None of this exist at lower levels and it makes the experience be really not fun.
That is the problem of their solution, but I do like old content being relevant.
In WoW, if you enter a Timewalking dungeon, nothing really changes, right? You’re still doing your normal rotation with your normal skills and spells, just with the damage scaled to your current level.
In FFXIV, the game instead temporarily levels you down to to match the level of the dungeon. So if you queue for a level 50 dungeon/raid, you lose access to all spells and abilities level 51+.
You can override that if you just want to go in solo and smash things at max level for transmog farming or whatever, but that’s not the default state of the game.
Sucks losing access to abilities but it’s healthier for the game overall. Anytime higher levels are doing low level content, everyone is on equal footing. It makes for a much better new player experience vs WoW where you get a level 80 just blowing through normals and kicking new players for moving too slow lol.
I partially agree. But classes should have access to their resources sooner. They take too long. It is plain miserable to commit to a first class, because they take forever to become interesting, like Dragoon or Black Mage.
And given how new classes have their kit better spread across levels, it is much more enjoyable just swap to something new once you can unlock them.
It is players first contact with the game, progression needs to be involving, and the way they made the game around max level for classes, a lot of time you get something and doesnt feel good.
Yeah, I don’t know how they get around that. If they give things out earlier, you end up with dead levels later on where you get nothing. Supposedly they are having internal discussions about a future squish though since they are already at level 100.
