True enough. But it was something that caught ME off guard initially so I felt the need to bring it up. Then again, FFXIV is the first time I’ve ever been a tank in an MMO. But the Marauder/Warrior playstyle just…fits…for me, weirdly enough. The rotation “feels” good and while I could want for a Charge ability, the diversification of my skillset really helps.
I’m assuming as I level up in other jobs there are skills and abilities I’ll be able to carry over? Not going to do that now (Lost a lot of progress initially as I kept job changing like a madman), but something to consider for the future. Same with the Golden Saucer. Got there, looked around, saw the Triple Triad table, and noped right away.
Context on that last bit - Back in College I literally sacrificed four hours of progress in Final Fantasy 8 because I lost my Ifrit Card. I literally bought the remaster on the Switch specifically to just play Triple Triad. Haven’t even go on the first trial and I’ve had the game for over a year.
There is a really good and largely spoiler-free documentary from No Clip that discusses 1.0 and all its troubles. There’s also another good one from Speaker’s Network. Goes over some background stuff so you know what’s going on when you start ARR and also just how the company had to shift its perspective entirely onto YoshiP.
The tl;dr is that FF14 is a mainline Final Fantasy game. It’s treated and developed like one. That’s not like saying “Oh, Square tried to make an MMO and waffled on it.” This is one of the biggest selling, most iconic franchises in game history. They HAD to make it successful somehow or FFXIV’s failure was going to quite literally bankrupt Square-Enix. The FF name would have been permanently tarnished.
Which is also why YoshiP and the devs are given so much praise among fans. Beyond his work with the community, they really did develop what was essentially an entirely new MMO that would normally take 5 years in 15 months. He shifted their entire workflow and actually used WoW as an inspiration on how to make FFXIV work (because 1.0 was made by a bunch of very dissonant Olds with no real concept of what MMO players liked).
Really, really fascinating docuseries and very worth watching not just as an FFXIV fan but as anyone interested in the inside happenings of game development and politics.
No. It used to work that way, that got scrapped as part of modernization. Every class gets what’s in their kit from their own levels. Although the role tab carries some skills that all jobs in the same role can use. (Ie; all tanks get access to interject and provoke).
Bad news friend: EW is going to have an achievement reward for collecting every Triple Triad card. I won’t even attempt that, and I completed Archaeology.
Fash forward several years. Shager Mol is a wreck. Max Level, but his Glamors are atrocious and he owns no home. He is dressed in motley rags, bone thin. Hands shaking, he picks up his cards from the Table
“At last…at last I have them all…at last…”
I know my Endgame poison. I refuse to partake until then.
Join us, Vann. Join the Triple Triad.
(Cards are actually saved to your character and not lost after a bout, so play freely, friend!)
They also have mahjong which WrA’s own Valliac is a fiend for.
Edit: I was given permission to share his character info. He is our resident localized PvP zone with a penchant for tiles and playing either MCH or MNK because “if no gun, then punch fine too”
Valliac Fayers - Malboro server.
Some cards you can only get by beating the NPCs. Something something “Children’s Card Games on Motorcycles.”
But otherwise…this game man. Tonal whiplash with some lighthearted banter followed by thinly veiled references of gruesome assaults.
Not going to lie, can we shelf what I’m doing at the moment so I can go to the camp this poor woman came from and claim their skulls for Khorne? Wrong universe, but at this point I don’t care. I’m with Wilfred at this point.
On release, FFXIV looked, and played, like it belonged to the jankiest early 2000s MMO you’ve ever played. It came out looking and feeling outdated. I cannot overstate enough how much I loathed it. Even ARR on release wasn’t very good; the cross-class system alone was so hideously grindy and user unfriendly. The story didn’t pick up until much later on, and most ARR class quests are dreary asf.
1.x Final Fantasy was so bad it almost blew up Square Enix as a company, like. Eugh.
If Blizz worked up the stones to do that with WoW, I’d be amazed.
Its painful watching that. When they spoke about 1.0’s fatigue system to keep hardcore gamers from progressing too fast, it made me think about where WoW is today.
It’s like Blizzard looked at everything SE did WRONG with 1.0 and said, “Let’s add that to Wow!”
I don’t even think WoW needs the ARR treatment. Yes, I’d love that due to how old the engine is and how outdated it is at certain parts, but I’d settle for them admitting that they need to design for the player. Not against.
WoW has a much easier task. The bones of WoW are functional. Combat is still pretty fun. Classes are mostly OK. The core gameplay is not a trainwreck. I can run around fighting stuff as a plate clad alien dude and basically have fun until I have to interact with some nightmarish endgame progression system or the dumb story
Some decent writing, jettisoning “borrowed power” systems for something more fun and permanent, and putting some work into community building would go a really long way
I remain surprised they don’t simply just develop one or two new class abilities per expansion that you keep going forward and that keeps the expansions relevant long term because incoming players are incentivized to do the content to get those abilities. (And the way power creep works, it’s not even inconveniencing said new players since they’d be able to solo it anyway)
Of course, I also was just bumming around Timeless Isle a few days ago and realized its annoying all these years later I’m locked out of the Fire Bull boss whats-his-bucket because I never got my Legendary Cloak.
Gated and Exclusive Content really sucks and I wish they’d stop doing that.
I’d also really love a shot at the Pandaren Phoenix Mounts.
I really doubt they’ll ever bring them back, in the same way as they don’t bring back old gladiator sets or old keystone master rewards. Challenge Modes were the precursor to m+ and I think a lot of players were already annoyed that they recolored the exclusive outfits and gave them to the entire playerbase in Legion, let alone if they dunked on the last remaining prestigious reward, lol.
it’s my thread blizzard let me like as many posts as i want
Anyway. I keep wanting to dive into RP but I simply can’t decide what sort of character I want to play. I have too many options and for once they all sound interesting.
I’m thinking I might hold out for Endwalker, though, because Thavnair and Radz-at-Han look really cool and if the lore is I just know I’ll want to RP a Thavnairian.
Honestly something to keep in mind, too, is that WoW is constantly changing up how classes play, especially during new expansions. It almost feels hard to feel attached to some classes that have gotten huge amounts of reworks over and over again coughsurvivalhunterbalancedruid, whereas FF14 only does drastic class changes when there’s an entire overhaul.
Some elements of the classes change when FF14 does an update, but the overall feel of the classes have been pretty consistent outside of a select few (one class that comes to mind is Machinist, who’s new rework as a god send compared to its old iteration which was a nightmare).
Either way, FF14 is also pretty good about keeping old content accessible outside of a select few stuff like old PvP gear sets/mounts.
edit;
I also just want to add that I became a thousand times more vain as a player when playing FF14 because they enable screenshotting so hard. In WoW I took screenshots, but in FF14? It’s an art form.
What’s funny about this, is that I’m someone who takes extended breaks from time to time from 14, usually end up going back to WoW but I’m really not feeling the pull of it this time. Anyway, I always seem to time it so I’m gone when some event or update and change happen so it’s like this switch flip whenever I come back and I have to figure out what they did. And I don’t mean any of this in a bad way. I’ve been back about a month now this time around and it took me like, two days to figure out why my Monk felt so much better this time. Then I realized they took away having to keep Greased Lightning stacks up and it was so very nice.
It’s crazy how one simple tweak will suddenly make a class infinitely better to play. I know some people feel weird without Grease Lightning, but most Monk mains I know love it so.
My big struggle with monk is that I love the aesthetic and animation because it’s baller but without grease stacks I have absolutely no idea what any cooldowns are even used for any more and it scares me
also it removed my favourite use case for fists of wind… more stacks, more speed
I just know I’ll want to RP a Thavnairian.